Manton, On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Manton Reece <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a pretty timely question because I just drafted a blog post > yesterday answering the same thing, which I hope to post real soon now (i.e. > realistically, months from now). Because I usually write and talk about my > indie business, a lot of people are surprised that I have a "regular" job as > well (and some client work, and too much other stuff for my own good). > I look forward to your post. I confess I sometimes forget that you do have a regular day job as well. > > The important thing to me is just that you consider your indie software a > real business, not a hobby. I can only speak for myself, but I treat my side > business as if it was a full time job, regardless of hours. Some weeks the > revenue matches a great salary and the hours are long into the night, and > other weeks it doesn't and they aren't, and that's fine. > > Not being a hobby means acting professionally, responding to support email > quickly, and definitely not making excuses for why there aren't more > software releases. There are plenty of reasons why software is late even for > larger companies! As long as you can keep up with the support load, you > shouldn't feel guilty if you don't live up to your own personal standards. > > I certainly don't see BitBQ as a hobby. I see it as my escape from the cubical world. But it does have to take a backseat sometimes to day job and my family. One of the trickiest things I've found so far is getting my spouse on board with the amount of time I need to dedicate to BitBQ to make it happen. She's starting to come around, but that's a tricky minefield right now since it's our busiest time of the year at work and I usually don't get home till well after 9 PM most nights. And I'm on call all weekend. I've been lucky that my support load has been low. I have an upcoming product release that could increase that, but responding as fast as possible is my highest priority. Having watched other indies run their support, it's something I've noted most handle it very quickly and well. Patrick [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
