[itpragmatik]

Great job Steve! Very encouraging and inspirational to read your post. I am usually a passive reader and mostly a consumer when it comes to blogs or stackoverflow/quora. Today I felt to post a comment because it really hit close. I too was doing very similar to what you wrote about. I have been building and managing http://www.marathimitra.com/ - an Indian language learning website for over last 10 years. I did make an attempt to make a business of out it for 18 months (from 2012 through 2013) but was unsuccessful and then went back to a full-time coding job. During those 18 months, I too did almost similar hacks, initiatives and improvements that you mention: mailchimp, paypal subscriptions, UI improvements and more. In the end I just was too tired of doing everything myself. I did bootstrap it myself and all along the 18 months and many more years before that I was the sole designer, programmer, project manager, content aggregator, marketing and sales person. It took a toll on me.

The big lesson I learned is that it is extremely important to have a co-founder. It would have been awesome if I had another person working with me equally invested as me with different skill set and that could have allowed me to last even longer and kept me going.

I wish you good luck and many best wishes.

Thanks for sharing a great story. Best.

[steveridout]

Thanks. I often wish I'd had a cofounder from the start, right now it's difficult to give away a big enough stake away to someone else to make it worth their while. For now I'm still hoping that sometime this year I'll be able to grow revenues to a point where i can make a living, and that would open the possibility to start hiring contractors to do some extra work, e.g. Design, marketing, support.

Well done for continuing your project for so long, I'm sure you must have learned a lot.