[tylerhall]

For the first five years, it was myself, alone in my home office at night and on weekends. My wife went to bed early and I'd have 10pm - 1am every night to hack around - plus random times on the weekend. After I went full time with it, I toured a few co-working spaces in Nashville, but most of them were either geared at MBAs who co-work for less than eight hours a week, or too expensive. So, even after going full time, it was still just me in my home office. But my working hours changed to a normal 9-5 routine. My wife also works from home, so I never went crazy from lack of human interaction.

As for business partners - never really considered one. I don't think there's enough work to go around. But I do partner with two designers, when needed, and have a few close friends who also do Mac development I can bounce ideas off of throughout the day.

[P4tr3ck]

This is exactly how I am building SonicWeb (http://www.sonicweb-radio.de), for 4 years now. You need to have a lot of patience and persistence if you take this route. There is always this nagging feeling that things don't move along fast enough. And you need to get used to program when your tired, very tired sometimes.

[larrys]

What about angel investors? With some money what do you think you could might be able to do that you can't do now?

[kjksf]

This is not the kind of business that angel investors are interested in.

An investor (be it an angel or, at a later stage, a VC fund) is interested in an exit at some point.

There's just no way a simple utility like VirtualHostX will ever generate profits that would warrant an exit event (which are limited to a sale to someone else or an IPO).

If there's no exit event, an investor doesn't get his money back. He might own a chunk of profitable business but it's paper money.

[larrys]

"Angel investors" and "angel investors in the valley" are not necessarily the same thing. Also the idea was not to invest in the particular product but in the entrepreneur and his capabilities.

[tylerhall]

I've had two offers from companies wanting to buy out VirtualHostX. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), neither company made compelling arguments for me to give up steady, stable income.