That small piece of info is my driving force every week as I recall how productive other entrepreneurs can be. So thank you.
I'm not especially productive. I just work relentlessly on NewsBlur, every single day. Check the graph on http://github.com/samuelclay. There's another year before that of the same persistent pushing. And oftentimes I think that I take more than twice the time others do to get something like a distributed feed fetcher built. But push through it and one day you're shipping.
My first year was all internal motivation. But after I launched, that very quickly switched to external motivation. I added NewsBlur's Get Satisfaction forum to the dashboard of every NewsBlur user. That way I get a lot more feedback about the product. I had to build that little table by hand, even writing a cronjob to grab the latest feedback so it would show up instantly for users just logging in, but that was so clearly the basis for my external motivation.
Getting paid, on the other hand, was never a motivation. It just didn't occur to me that I could live off NewsBlur. Even today, that's not the case. But I'm taking a gamble by going full-time, spending the next few months cranking out my big social branch, and seeing if there's something bigger in NewsBlur. Luckily, at this rate, simply monetizing the current site might be enough to keep me off the streets.
Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.
So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project comfortable to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.