On a personal note, I just wanted to update everyone on what I’ve been up to:
Open Source
The past four months have been dedicated to working full time onBroccoli (blogpost), thanks tosome savings from my previous consulting gigs, combined with moderate livingexpenses.
In retrospect, taking time off to write Broccoli was clearly worth it. I wentone month over my original budget of three months, but people’s enthusiasticreactions at EmberConf have convinced me that I solved a worthwhile problem,and that writing Broccoli will pay off in productivity increases across thecommunity. Personally, having Broccoli will help me with the upcoming work onmy business, and writing it has helped me become a better developer.
Starting a week from now, I will scale my open-source work back to part time,to about 1–2 hours per day. There is still work to be done on Broccoli as wellas related projects like ember-cli, but it doesn’t require full-timecommitment from me anymore.
Building better community is another thing I’m planning to dedicate some timeto. I will blog about this soon.
My vague expectation is that in a year or so, I will find another worthwhileproblem to solve, and take some time off in a similar fashion. In themeantime, it is time for me to work on my business.
Business: Solitr
SEO
Solitr started off as a weekend project, but then Inoticed it started getting actual traffic. I knew that the highest-ranked sitefor “solitaire” gets over 100k dailyvisits, soI figured that with ad-monetization alone, there’s probably a business there.
Since then, traffic to Solitr has risen to 4000 daily visits (mostly throughranking for niche keywords), even though I haven’t been able to work much onit so far. Some testing with AdSense indicates that I can start paying therent with it. That’s not much, but it feels quite liberating. It also makes meconfident that once the search ranking improves, I can have a viable business.
My plan is to hit 100k daily visitors by the end of 2015. Getting there willrequire some SEO work, both on the main keyword (“solitaire”) and long tailfor niche keywords and i18n.
A/B Testing
I also want to learn A/B testing, in parallel to the SEO work. A/B testingrequires many data points to yield statistically significant results. Runninga free-to-play game presents a unique opportunity to get my hands dirty, as Iget a ludicrous number of data points very early in my business – the kind ofdata that with a SaaS business you would only get at significant scale.
My role model for this is Patrick McKenzie– my Solitr is approximately equivalent to his Bingo Card Creator – and hisextensive blogging has been of immeasurable value to me. I hope to pay itforward by being open about Solitr and blogging about my adventures with A/Btesting in a similar vein.
I view the A/B testing work mostly as paid-for education. Perhaps I canmonetize it a bit by selling boutique consulting like Patrick. But moreimportantly, I’ll have a valuable tool for scaling businesses in myprofessional skill set. If I start a business in the future (say a B2B SaaS)and it gets traction, I’m hoping that data-driven tools like A/B testing willallow me to scale it and realize returns much faster than I’d be able tootherwise.
That’s all for now. See you all soon, on Twitter and GitHub!
