For the owners of a small bootstrapped company, pretty much anything that doesn't increase revenue is a distraction and should be delegated to someone else, or some other company.
That doesn't mean you always can delegate them. Or that things like ops aren't important. It just means that a company's founder isn't the ideal person for the job, even if they can do it well.
There are 20-30 ruby conferences every year in the US alone. I've been to about 7. They all had > 200 attendees. Even the less-known ones tend to sell out well in advance.
Freelance rates for ruby developers are crazy-high. In Seattle, at least, I'm seeing $200/hr as not uncommon.
And on a side note, PHP has been around for about 80 years now and it's still moving along.
So I don't think ruby/rails are going to "die" any time soon.
I switched a few months ago and it's been great. I was afraid I was going to have to switch away, since we're going to be out of the country a lot next year. I'm super happy to be able to stick with them now.
You are a black box. Your brain and body take in the world as input and produce thoughts, feelings, and actions as output.
Some of the most valuable knowledge you'll ever acquire is knowledge of how that black box works.
Are you feeling distracted studying french? Is it because you hate french or because you skipped breakfast?
Once you're able to link up cause and effect, you can take action to minimize things you want less of, and maximize things your want more of.
How do you know what you want? It takes time, and you have to fumble around. I've found that a lot of people who take a super-narrow path in and after college tend to look up one day and find that they're in a place they never wanted to go.
BTW, I would personally suggest that you ignore anybody here who's giving you answers about investing or going to elite schools, etc. Those are means to an end. And it may not be the end you want.
The only important life goals for you are the ones you come up with. And you get to change your mind. :)
ps. Who am I? I'm in my mid 30's. Co-founder of a successful software business (not a funded startup). And I've fumbled around a lot. The one thing that's saved me time and time again has been a modicum of self-knowledge and a willingness to jump in and learn new things, many times outside my comfort zone.
pps. Don't forget to enjoy your life. Be kind to yourself.
You are giving up too early. You can make money on this product, but you just have to be willing to spend time learning to market it.
And by market I don't mean advertise. I mean, finding a group of people who really need inventory management and then tailoring your app to their specific needs.
For example, how many $1000s of dollars a year do restaurants lose from inventory spoilage? How does that compare with the cost of paying someone to enter all that data into your system?
Because, as a business owner, I only care about how your app is going to make or save me money.
One more thing. Not every type of business does well with a no-touch sales process. I suspect that with something like inventory management, you'll want to focus on an industry, go to trade shows, and really insert yourself into that world. Bizdev is really underrated in this self-serve world.
It becomes non trivial to detect when they start spamming using 100s of aged accounts run through proxies. You can detect that lots of people are submitting stories to the atlantic, but it looks organic.
Heroku isn't for apps that can't stand downtime. My experience has been that if you have 2-3 heroku apps, and you monitor them with a 3rd party tool, you'll see random "server not found" behavior every few weeks. (And no, they're not just timing out from dyno spinup). Usually this isn't a system wide outage and never gets mentioned on their status page.
So only use heroku if:
a) Uptime is non-critical & you just don't want to deal with setting up a server
b) Uptime is non-critical & You don't know how to set up a server
The site hasn't really changed in the month since launch. It's hard to believe that's possible with 2 devs + a designer on-board. (I'm personally involved in this space, so I've been keeping an eye on the site, and have a good idea of what can be shipped in a month)
It looks suspiciously like they burned through a lot of money developing the initial site and now are looking for a cheap way to continue development. Going after someone still in college is one way to do that I guess.
Anyway, maybe I'm wrong, and they're working on some new super-secret v2 that will blow everything out of the water.
Congrats on the launch. This space is definitely seeing a lot of interesting activity. Rofo's in SF, and we just launched in Portland ( http://www.officespace.com/Portland-OR ).
Best of luck. You guys definitely have a nice interface.
IMHO, bootstrap is nice for small short-term projects where the developer is making the design decisions.
However, it's been my experience that the design of most midsize and larger projects is greatly influenced by a designer. And unless they design with bootstrap or any other CSS framework in mind, you easily wind up in a square-peg-round-hole situation.
Honestly, I don't get what all the fuss is about. Bootstrap is just another web theme. Sure it looks nice, and is pretty flexible. But it's still just a theme.
Hi, I'm glad you found the write-up helpful. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. (my email address is in my blog header).
At the moment I'm not planning any more trips. I took a job with a startup in Seattle, and so I'll be here for a few more years. After that, who knows :)
You don't need much of a war chest if you go to the right places & have a decent amount of work. In guadalajara (a big city), $1k / month will get you full-time spanish lessons plus room and board. Hostels are about $12/night if you want to go that route.
My standard of living was very good. I had a 2 bedroom house in the trendy part of the city. Ate out whenever I wanted. etc. I imagine I was spending 20k a year (not including state-side expenses such as student loans).
My spanish is pretty good. You learn survival spanish pretty quickly. After a year I'm able to hold conversations, understand song lyrics, etc...more or less :)
I don't think I lost any clients from being in mexico. It was win-win. They got a good developer at a slight discount. I got my mobility. Actually, about 1/2 of my existing clients never knew I was in mexico. I didn't hide it from them, but it never came up.
Coolest part: making a lot of friends from around the world.
That doesn't mean you always can delegate them. Or that things like ops aren't important. It just means that a company's founder isn't the ideal person for the job, even if they can do it well.