[garply]

It's funny, I crossed the profitability line a while back after several failed attempts, but I don't really feel much different. When I finally did make a "successful" company, it was a little like when you've been practicing a song on an instrument for a while and you look at one bit that has always felt a bit not right, and you tweak it a bit and you realize that you just corrected a mistake that you had been unknowingly repeating. Or when you're speaking a foreign language and your ears can suddenly hear a place where you've always been speaking with a slight accent but which you didn't know about before.

My point is, from the beginning, I've made many such realizations and corrections and at some point I guess I just made enough to be able to create a profitable company.

The flip-side is, I feel like I'm still playing my instrument badly, just slightly less badly than before. Every day I wake up anxious about sales and think about my latest expansion plans - just trying to add stones to the wall that stands between me and starvation, which is what I've been doing all along.

I'd be interested to hear if others have had a similar experience as I.