> taking 7 months to build and not shipping anything
So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point.
> how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out?
If things don't go terribly wrong, the project should be up for beta testing in early October.
I'd lead with "Share your family's photos, access them everywhere you want them" rather the rather conspiratorial "corporations cannot be trusted". At least if you want to appeal to families. But what do I know!
I pay $99/year for Mylio which does importing, syncing & basic editing between devices, but my goodness it's slow - the only saving grace is that it's faster than Lightroom. Mylio doesn't really trade on privacy despite the impressive self-hosted cloud sync, and it doesn't trade on sharing between family members despite that being quite useful! If you want to see a very similar product, check out their forums and their very vocal customer base.
I'm also working on a solo startup (accounting) and I feel a lot of your pain - I've got 2 kids and it's mega-slow trying to work about 10hrs/week, but I'd echo what a few other people said here: however painful it feels, spend 50% of your time marketing and testing to make sure you're building the right thing. I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now, but it's valuable to a few users who are giving me feedback.
As a thin-skinned introvert, marketing doesn't come naturally to me. But yes, I've been trying to internalize this and in fact this blog post was a step towards putting myself out there.
> I have an embarrassing prototype of my product out right now
That's fantastic! I hope things work out the way you want them to. :)
Props on pushing your edge with the post. Building or tapping an existing community of early adopters is an enviable position to be in for a solo founder. Very unsticking. The feedback loop provides much desired certainty. Whether Twitter, Discord/Slack, a forum, whatever.
So I spent the first couple of months chasing an on-premise alternative to photo storage[1]. Then I realized that the product was difficult to sell, and required a substantial investment of capital so I pivoted to an E2EE alternative on the cloud. I also spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to raise investment, which I regret at this point.
> how long are you going to spend before actually testing that out?
If things don't go terribly wrong, the project should be up for beta testing in early October.
[1]: https://orma.in