Over time I’ve come to discover some weaknesses in Angular on Rails as a business. These weaknesses include:

• Most of the people who subscribe to my email list seem to be interested in building side projects. They don’t come to my site because they’re part of a going concern that has suddenly developed an expensive problem. They’re interested in my site because they’re working on a side project which almost by definition doesn’t have any revenue associated with it. I’m selling to individuals paying with pocket money, not businesses paying with business money.
• Angular moves and changes very quickly, meaning my content is constantly going out of date. I have to either live with the out-of-date content or go back and update it, which is very, very time-consuming.
• The market size for “developers who use Angular + Rails” might not be great enough to support the size of business I want to build.
• I actually believe that most web applications should not be single-page applications and that the single-page application craze is a force for ill in the web development world.
• Unlike other people’s self-published books apparently did, mine never led to any real consulting gigs (I tried!), probably for the “side project reason” listed above.

So I’ve decided to move on and start a new business. Unlike when I killed and shuttered my previous business, Snip, I plan to leave Angular on Rails up for the time being. It doesn’t cost that much to run and it doesn’t require any meaningful level of customer support.

Ideally, my next business has the following characteristics:

• My customers are spending company money to buy my products and services, not personal money
• The domain of the business is something I personally can write about intelligently
• The domain be written about in an evergreen way
• It’s conducive to building an audience
• It touches on an area where I already have some expertise

I have an idea which I believe checks most if not all of these boxes. I call it LandingPageBreakdowns.com. It’s somewhat inspired by UserOnboard. I first conceived of the idea a few weeks ago, although in a somewhat different form. Today I kind of finalized the idea, registered the domain name, and put up my first breakdown: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

My thinking is this: over time I expect to build some traffic and get some email opt-ins. Once I have enough subscribers—1000 or so—I can think about putting together an info product, perhaps just an ebook aggregating my breakdowns and discussing what the good ones and bad ones have in common. Then, like Samuel from UserOnboard does, maybe I can offer training. I also plan to do interviews with some of the people behind the businesses whose landing pages I examine.

And maybe throughout the course of doing all this I’ll come up with a software product to build.

In any case, my first goal is to get my first subscriber by the end of the week and to get 25 subscribers by the end of August.