[aguynamedrich]

I still disagree that your case is the average and that your situation can be used to model any young startup. Don't get me wrong, I admire what you're doing and the strong statement you're making about productivity and balancing priorities. I just agree with the above comment that it sounds a bit smug, especially by the title. There's an implied message of "I rode this methodology to ~$5M in funding, so you can too", and I think that makes a huge oversight that this is the same company that hosts some of the largest international developer/new technology conferences six times every year. Aren't you also the owner of the company that hosts FOWA, FOWD and FOM twice a year each? Doesn't that at least deserve a mention? "This works for us, but we also have the kind of industry connections and positioning that practically predisposes us to this kind of funding the second we're in the black anyway"

What I think happened here is that you did a number of things right which affords you this flexibility in hours. I would say the real story is that you made something of value vs the free-but-pointless model we read about much more often these days. You built a business around something valuable with a relatively high price point that makes it less of a victim of the kind of scalability issues that "general public" web based services are dealing with.

I think the bigger take away would be: If you make something awesome for the general public that millions of people will be using all day long, plan to work seven days a week 'round the clock and there's no guarantee you'll ever see a penny. If you come up with something valuable that people would be willing to pay $25-$50 a month for, your life will be much, much more enjoyable and you might actually get to watch your kids grow up and/or have some time left for your hobbies.

[Tloewald]

There's quite enough "we worked 100h weeks and ate ramen on our road to success" stories out there to balance this one out, don't worry.