Left my job in 2020 to do the same. Nowhere near as profitable as OP, but now make enough to cover rent + basic expenses in New York. Crucially: I didn't want to do hypeman social media content that (a) sold the dream of solopreneur as a marketing tactic, or (b) added excessive noise into the ether.
I'm not saying Tony did either -- I haven't followed along -- but certainly a lot of people do. I can't fully blame the people who do, though.
Anyway. The project I've built [1] is still going, and I feel proud of it on merits of software: that it pushes the bounds, however slightly; that it feels good to exist in the world; and that I genuinely care for the people using it.
All that's to say: I think there's a software solopreneur path that doesn't involve excessive hype, gross self-promotion (some degree of self-branding is necessary though), while allowing you to work by principles and also explore interesting software problems.
Feel free to DM me [2] if you have questions, or are interested in bootstrapping your own project. Especially consumer-facing. I do have some writing online [3] that covers this too.
* Those hotkeys should work (follows Figma's example).
* A very high priority.
* Yeah... I plan to let people disable click (e.g. pointer-events: none) on elements, but automatically detecting transparent overlapping areas is a bit more work.
Ohh. I misread this. I thought you meant auto-save the editor. Now my response seems glib. Absolutely -- I should at least warn people when they try to exit the drawing view.
Currently working on the ability to copy and paste the underlying blocks into your own editor (with owner’s permission) —- big believer in popping the hood!
Long term dream is to have the HTML output look good enough that people can edit at both WYSIWYG and code levels.
It could do with a heavy perf pass tbh. Haven’t had time juggling all the feature work, but it’s planned for 1.0. Mind letting me know what machine you’re on?
Unfortunate compromise of not paying for font licenses — and google fonts is the most extensive collection of free fonts.
As for fonts — it’s unideal! Those initial fonts are actually just the glyphs subset of fonts so I can display their names in the font picker. It’s already somewhat cut down by separating the fonts into basic and all, as well as delaying the load a few seconds after initial load, but still a lot to fix up there.
As to charging an (optional) paid plan, unfortunately, I have been bootstrapping this full-time the past few years, and because I can’t till my own land anymore, have to find the least terrible way of exchanging labor for money, such that I can pay for food and bills.
That being said, there is a free tier for this very reason, as I remember all the free services that got me started initially. Hoping to make this tier more generous once the project is profitable.
Let me know if you have other ideas. If I can (a) pay for business costs (accounting, APIs, hosting, etc), (b) pay for my bills, (c) attain a and b w/ incentives that align with my users and the principles of the project — I am all ears.
Thanks for sharing original link — had not seen that project before. I’ll refrain from commenting on their funding, but fyi is mmm.page is wholly bootstrapped (which has left a healthy dent in my savings over the past three years haha).
So if you enjoy the project, or want to support some of the researchy aspects of it, please consider upgrading!
I have another article in the works about the importance of independent funding models and slow growth incentives w/r/t organic social networks, and projects that necessarily require slow exploration as a community (not, in contrast, “spaces designed by committee”).
Re: laggy. I know... 1.0 introduced new features but also inefficiencies. The cost of working on something solo. Releasing a patch soon.