nudge

You need to balance what you need to get done with your natural curiosity. Separate them out and make sure both happen.

1. Work out what material you need to cover on your required studies.

2. Break it down into shorter, manageable bits. A chapter per week, perhaps.

3. Make completion of these bits concrete, so you know you are progressing (and not just reading). Completing the exercises, perhaps.

4. Break down the bits even further, so you can plan them across days.

5. Every day at the same time, start working on these bits.

6. When you finish your bits for a day, stop working. Your reward is the rest of the day to learn about whatever you feel like, guilt-free.

Do you feel the same way about learning to speak foreign languages and play musical instruments? Is it obnoxious for a person to teach introductory French night classes, when fluency will take years and may never be possible for the students given their other commitments? What if it is not even likely that they will ever have French-language conversations "of value"? Does the very act of proposing learning this new skill insult French speakers everywhere?

I keep encountering this attitude among programmers, that the idea of "learning" is something that is the completion of a journey of worthiness. It's extremely disappointing.

Drive metal stakes right through them. I don't know if this will make it impossible to recover data, but it'd be difficult.

I've got a better idea. You give me the $4k and I'll fly to San Diego and beat you with a stick any time you stop working.

Seriously though, this is a really weird plan. It's a huge amount of money to spend for something that almost certainly won't have the effect you want. Unless you want burnout and a serious case of "maybe we should have budgeted more time to take a look around Hong Kong, which is actually pretty cool".

Take a working vacation if you want, but it's not the place you're in that's causing you trouble.

It's impossible to answer this properly without seeing your site. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts:

1. Features don't matter in the abstract. You can succeed with fewer features by being, for example, simpler. That's the 37signals "do less" line. You say features are crucial for your white-label solution. Are you so sure? Why do you think this is? How do you know this is why you are losing customers? ("Clearly" is a dangerous word). Who do you think your customers are? What if your customers were somebody else? (See point 3).

2. "...even though their price point is higher..." - this suggests you don't know that high price is often precisely why customers choose things. High prices suggest high quality, and in the absence of other ways of distinguishing between products, it's a very easy one for people to follow. Perhaps you charge so little that you give the impression of not being serious? And, relatedly, perhaps if you charged more you would be able to spend more to acquire users?

3. Pick a niche and own it. If your site works for user types X, Y and Z, just pick some subset of X to go after. Your product will be more targeted to them, which makes it easier for them to see it as something they could use, and it also should make it easier for you to market. See, for example, the many sites that offer build-your-own-websites for photographers, as opposed to simply just build-your-own-websites for everybody.

4. Win on design, on copywriting, on user experience, on humour, on speed, on sociality, on security, on reliability, on locality, on trust, on friendliness. Win on anything that's not what you can't win on. On the internet, there's room for more than one winner.

But, like I said, if we could see your site you'll get better answers.

Why would there be such a thing? Would you create a service with that kind of value (and actual running costs) and give it away for free?

Say you have doubts, and that you want to discuss them. Then discuss them, in an orderly and dispassionate way. Keep in mind the possibility that you are the one who's wrong, and you'll be fine. Be calm, rational and modest.

Also: creativity does not mean not rejecting ideas. Creativity involves rejecting vast quantities of ideas. It just also involves creating more ideas than you reject. So one important phase of being creative is uncritically spawning vast numbers of ideas. Another important phase is critically evaluating them. Hemingway (apparently - this is potentially apocryphal) said "I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to throw the shit in the wastebasket."

My guess would be that there's very little money in it, and for what money there is (advertising of such events, perhaps), competition is fierce.

But if you've got a good way to disrupt it, go ahead!

It's a patent application, not a patent. The difference is important.

Okay, that wasn't clear to me, but it's a good point.

You could write up some advice to other non-programmers / "business guys" unsure of how to start: "writing a spec" is indeed a good way to start building.

Why are you wondering whether you have an idea or 'something more'? Just build it, or hire somebody to build it for you, or talk it over with some people. Anything that moves you forward. Wondering what you have isn't going to help you at all.