I found this to be a great article and can identify very closely with it. I created a webservice back in 2010. Fortunately I am still operating, although certainly not "killing it". At least not enough to go full time.
Lesson 1. Sales and Marketing. So true. I think every entrepreneur greatly underestimates sales and renvenue growth. It's easy to create "top-down" market share spreadsheets and imagine the opportunities. It just never works that way. I am starting to learn that Sales is a major part of any company. People tend to think that just because there are fewer and fewer brick and mortar stores, and face to face meetings for that matter, that sales isn't an integral a part of a company.
Lesson 2. Indeed money is important. But at the same time how necessary is it for a lot of what Silicon Valley is producing these days. Hardware and development tools are the cheapest they have ever been. You certainly don't need a ton of venture backing to create a web service. That is the approach I am taking.
Lesson 3. With my web service I never created spreadsheets with forecasted user growth. But at the same time can say growth never really took off the way I had hoped. More important to me is year over year growth.
Lesson 4. I am still running this as a sole founder... Anyone out there interested in sales/marketing?
Lesson 5. Great point. Always a difficult decision knowing what features to add. More and more I add features and have the requesting customer at least partially fund the development of it. And more often than not don't release them as a "public" features. Sometimes you have to resort to "consultingware" until your fully self-serve web serivce takes off on its own.
Lesson 6. Indeed. Never be afraid to reach out to people who sign up for your service and ask them more. Stackoverflow is a great site to "find peoples pain".
Lesson 7. Yes - you always have to keep your chin up, especially on days where you feel
It would be interesting if Ross could share some indicators on his revenue. If not, other metrics like how long it took to get the first sale, etc.
I operate a SaaS that is based around Google Analytics Dashboarding (http://www.embeddedanalytics.com). I have never had success with Google Adwords, very low conversion rate to signups (<2%). Traffic coming from referral sites (mostly stackoverflow.com) is much better.