[talbina]

Samuel, I just wanted to let you know that you are a huge inspiration to me even though you don't know me. I remember your first post when you said you did the first version of your site while commuting on the NYC subway every day.

That small piece of info is my driving force every week as I recall how productive other entrepreneurs can be. So thank you.

[conesus]

Originally this blog post was going to be a "and so can you" type post. I thought it was kind of important to set the tone to say that I'm a schlub who just pushed hard enough on the persistence/patience/perseverance/perspiration mix. It ended up being all about me instead, but I'm still working on the post in my head.

I'm not especially productive. I just work relentlessly on NewsBlur, every single day. Check the graph on http://github.com/samuelclay. There's another year before that of the same persistent pushing. And oftentimes I think that I take more than twice the time others do to get something like a distributed feed fetcher built. But push through it and one day you're shipping.

My first year was all internal motivation. But after I launched, that very quickly switched to external motivation. I added NewsBlur's Get Satisfaction forum to the dashboard of every NewsBlur user. That way I get a lot more feedback about the product. I had to build that little table by hand, even writing a cronjob to grab the latest feedback so it would show up instantly for users just logging in, but that was so clearly the basis for my external motivation.

Getting paid, on the other hand, was never a motivation. It just didn't occur to me that I could live off NewsBlur. Even today, that's not the case. But I'm taking a gamble by going full-time, spending the next few months cranking out my big social branch, and seeing if there's something bigger in NewsBlur. Luckily, at this rate, simply monetizing the current site might be enough to keep me off the streets.

[petercooper]

I had a similar experience to you 2004-2007 with an RSS-to-everything service called Feed Digest. It started as a way to get my Delicious links onto my blog and eventually turned into my full time job with 25k users. I sold it in 2007 after a number of mistakes on my part: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i-sold-my-st...

Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.

So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project comfortable to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.