After about two months of working on it, I’ve decided to stop working on Exosuit, the tool I’ve been building to make Rails + AWS deployments easier.
The reason for my decision is that I decided that the amount of time it would take to get Exosuit off the ground (in terms of hours per day) is substantially more time than I have available.
I know from painful past experience that it’s not enough to build the product. The product also has to be marketed. The marketing work takes a serious amount of time and effort. For a relatively complex software project such as Exosuit, I don’t have time to do the programming work, the marketing work, AND have a day job.
For context, I had spent about 2 months working on the Exosuit “MVP” and in that time I maybe only got about halfway done, estimating generously. I would have spent another 2, 4 or 6 months building the thing before it would even have been un-fragile enough to let another person touch it. Throughout all that time, all marketing work would be 100% on hold. That seems like a really risky plan.
I still think the product idea is a good one. I hope to come back to it someday. I just don’t have the resources at the present to build it and turn it into a viable business.
My plan now is to turn my attention back to building my email list and selling Rails-related info products. That stuff hadn’t been going as well as I would have liked, but my current thinking is that it’s a better bet to try to improve what was already working than to try a totally new thing.
Thanks for the update and good luck to your entrepreneurial endeavors.
Thanks!