federalfarmer

Thanks for sharing what's worked for you, OP. Some of these are very enriching strategies for when the grind feels insurmountable.

Some of them can also feed delusion or false signals - most people you talk to aren't going to outright tell you that your app sucks, for example.

Non-monetary signals can also be encouraging but misleading long-term. My last attempt at a solo SaaS was a financial data application that had a lot of built-in virality. People really liked it, traffic was growing, and I thought I was succeeding at "product-led growth."

But the monetizable parts of my app appealed to a completely different type of person than the viral parts. What's worse, the sales process for people willing to pay was also very different. I'd built a low-touch marketing funnel with "prosumer" pricing but needed a high-touch sales channel with few clients and a fat price tag!

It was a "pivot or die" moment and a tough pill to swallow as it was the first time I'd built a software project with lots of happy users. Those users just wouldn't pay me, and rather than burn another 6-12 months re-tooling the entire business, I killed it instead.

If you are not getting ANY traction whatsoever it may be time to move on. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm your target audience and I would not give you money for this. I might not even use your app, as a search engine could get me viable coworking locations and curated reviews faster and more accurately.

Maybe there is a path to success where coworking spaces themselves pay you for a listing and the remote workers themselves aren't your customers? But as they say, your paid solution has to be 10x better than any free competitor and in this case your free competitors are Google and Facebook.

Pigeon pie is now a bucket list delicacy.

We did some pest control on the farm this year and thinned out the pigeon population. A delicious bird, tasted like steak. I understand why they remain a delicacy in France and Vietnam.

A shame that some of these less delectable birds are still extinct.

Thanks for sharing!

I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku.

What makes Coolify so useful?

It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you?

Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance over time? What am I missing?

> The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes.

These three challenges + context-switching between marketing and product are really tough at the early stage.

I've found that growing a business from 0-1 is very formulaic - not easy but the roadmap is clear. Scaling one is much harder, especially without outside capital. There's a huge gulf between earning enough to replace your salary vs. hiring good people to take over lower-level tasks early on. And marketing usually ends up being too critical to outsource at first.

At least with digital products, customer disputes can always be settled with refunds, even when the claim is dubious. Eat the loss and move on. Physical product disputes really sting when you're out the cost of inventory + labor.

Reticulum seems like a promising protocol but I doubt it can be used practically as a mesh over packet radio at low baud rates given its asymmetric encryption suite.

Constant key exchanges, message acknowledgements, and large payloads over standards like AX.25 or FT8 would quickly congest a given frequency using off-the-shelf analog equipment that requires audio mod/demod. But it would probably work fine for more traditional, client-server traffic or simplex traffic.

It seems much better suited to digital traffic in the 900mhz+ range a-la Meshtastic or Arednmesh.