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.
Yes, exactly. If Ruby is dying, then why are Ruby conferences popping up everywhere? Why are Ruby developers in desperately short supply?
I live in Israel, where Ruby has taken a while to make inroads. But we just had a conference last week, and the many attendees were super excited about the language. And companies were desperate to find employees who know Ruby and/or Rails.
Indeed, the biggest reason that I've found companies give for avoiding the use of Ruby is the scarcity of experienced developers. A client of mine switched from Ruby to PHP last year, simply because he could easily find PHP programmers, and they cost a lot less. You could argue that this points to companies leaving Ruby, but in many ways, I'd say that it rather indicates Ruby is a victim of its own success.
Even if Ruby is dying (which I don't think is the case), plenty of seemingly dead languages are still in demand, and are used on all sorts of projects. You can command great consulting rates in COBOL, today, if you want.
Both Ruby and Rails have strong, active communities that are pushing the language and framework forward in all sorts of interesting ways. The key to a successful open-source project is the community, so I'm pretty confident that I'll be working in Ruby for at least a few more years. But hey, if the author wants to work in something else, power to him; we're fortunate to be living in an era of many high-quality, open-source languages.
Thank you for being the first comment (I've seen) that actually looks at some amount of data. It's hard to read "most Rails people are moving on", "Rails and Ruby don't find the new web model" and "node.js is replacing Ruby" over and over without anyone saying how they're coming to their conclusions.
My thoughts are the same as yours... Ruby and/or Rails aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just think, Rails powers the site that stores most startups code. It may not be as shiny and new as it was, but there's still a lot of usage.
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.
"We’ve now approved over $700k worth of projects in the last
five months and our rate of accepted projects has been growing
at an average of almost 30 percent monthly."
Booked commission revenue is over $100K for those five months. Given that growth is ramping up, they're likely booking over $30K in commissions per month now. Actual commission revenue is undoubtedly less due to abandoned projects, non-payments, refunds, and so on. However that's a healthy business and huge kudos to them for a great MVP example.
Just wanted to chime in: free plans are for venture businesses that benefit from network affinity (the classic example being dropbox).
I'd also like to note two things:
1) if you want to charge more, tell a better story
2) if you want to charge more, take features out of your product
Those two axioms are usually true and apply pretty generally to SaaS businesses.
At 2600hz we started with free plans and then realized the headache, now we mostly do paid support (there's a lot of free-ness because we're open-source anyways).
Generally though, I'd recommend against free trials. They just waste a lot of your time with tire kickers.
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.
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.