I made $7k in 2012 while running simplehoney. (me and my cofounder paid ourselves minimum wage so we could keep 3 people on payroll and get a group rate for health insurance)
biggiesu I totally agree. We actually had a prolonged discussion about a many different ideas.
Oddly enough, the issues we expected to have the hardest time ended up being the easiest to answer. When you've spent a lot of time with someone hanging out outside of work, doing normal stuff like spending time with their family, shooting the shit and not talking about work but just being people it allows you to be more open.
There was a time where Joyce and I got excited about doing a dating site, for a day or two we did a bunch of research and were slowly building momentum. By the second day I woke up and I realized that my heart just was not into the idea doing a dating site (sorry dating sites, I'm married). I shared my feelings with Joyce and after a short conversatio we dropped it and moved on.
We eventually came up with the concept of a "24-hour test". If we didn't care or love the current idea we were working on after 24 hours, we would move on to something else.
We iterated through several other ideas in this fashion... researching, prototyping or mocking up, digging in, thinking, debating. One or two ideas made it past 24 hours, and one made it a couple weeks.
But, finally, after several months of planning we landed on an idea that we both are excited about. I can't wait to share it with the world.
We try to track our users level happiness by using basic metrics like time on site, times people share. We're still working out our own formula for doing what matters means to us. We think we're getting there.
Would be interesting to hear about pitch decks that include a "happiness quotient" or some metric tied to the emotion level of their users.
In the long term, I'm curious if focusing on this sort of metric is good for business.