Ask HN: Founders, what's your lifestyle like?

My partner kidnapped my children to different country.Three week granparent visit for "trial" will be soon two years. I dont have much options, so I followed. Now I am at country with zero friends and unknown language. I can not order in shop, my children just started talking in foreign language and I need translator.

This brings lot of stress, but it is also (sort of) distraction free. There is basically a truce with my partner. I am lucky to work from home and spend lot of time with my children.

I work about 2 hours/day to pay our bills. For another 5 hours I work on my "PROJECT". Very niche programming library in good field. Next year it will be ready, I am planning to divorce and scale up the business.

I am 10x programmer in very narrow field, all this reduces my productivity to third, so still doable.

Sell to small businesses. Not consumers (too hard to convince them to spend money), not enterprise (too much work for me; I hate sales).

Make something that will earn the customer money, or save them money. If it can earn or save them more than you charge, it's easy to sell, and they'll be happy to pay for it. That covers a surprisingly large number of potential business ideas any developer could create on their own. One of my first successful ones was just a WordPress plugin to add Amazon-style review/rating capabilities to any site, before anyone else had commoditized that. It saved money (versus hiring a developer) and earned money (most of the customers were affiliate marketers building product review/comparison sites, and their sites earned them more commissions when they had good-looking user reviews on the product pages). I made $250K from that plugin before selling the business on Flippa.

Make it easy to get that value out of your product as soon as possible. I do a free trial. I expect users to at least "get" how they can earn or save money using the product before that trial's over. The most important aspect to that is to get onboarding right: good lifecycle e-mails, a good first-login experience, and walkthroughs or something else that guides new users through the product. That's also what minimizes the customer service load.

If you have a good product, the customers will come. Well, maybe you'll need some AdWords ads to get the first ones; that's what I did. Now there's 2-3 signups a day that are just referrals from existing customers. It's enough to stay ahead of subscription churn.

Oh, and pricing is important. I doubled W3Counter's MRR by changing the plans around and adding annual billing. Improvely's MRR grows as the customers' businesses grow since pricing is tied to the level of traffic their sites get. The value they get out of the product grows with that too, so everyone's growing together and happy about it.

That's about as big as I can manage it, so that works out. Not looking to expand at the moment. Some people may work for us full time when they wrap up their day job.