On being a single founder for 7 years

your most important next steps are now get customers , get customers and get customers ....

so

- remove the "closed beta" tag

- have a graphic designer give it a 2013 layout

- put up an price page

- buy some adwords to start doing live user testing

- start optimizing the sales funnel

It sounds more like a guy has been wandering around the world, living what is surely a very interesting nomadic existence, hacking up a storm, rather than building a business though.

JavaScript like scripting language? Custom markup? Beta for 5 years? This doesn't sound like the path to profits to me.

1) Single hacker trying to build a business and the product at the same time by themselves. They do everything, by themselves.

2) A business where there is a single founder with all the equity. They have employees and those employees are paid with currency.

In the case of 1, I think it's a very hard road. Most software is built by more than one person, and most businesses must involve more than one person. You can of course make pretty good money off of freelancing, but building a business around a product is tough. Of course, not impossible.

In the case of 2, you need to be willing to "put your money where your mouth is" because you'll need to pay people. And even then, if you see any success and want to grow faster, you probably won't be the only shareholder for long. Jeff Bezos started Amazon alone, but they're a public company now so there are lots of shareholders. However, it is interesting to look at eg Sergei Brin's net worth as a ratio of Google's market cap versus the same for Bezos and Amazon. Not splitting equity in the beginning makes a big difference later on if everything goes according to plan (which it rarely does, but hey).

The OP probably falls into definition #1

Congrats on persevering for that long but I almost think this is a case example of the downside to being a single founder...no one to rein in your feature creep time.

With that being said, I would suggest that he seriously consider a pivot in his marketing strategy due to competition which has emerged during his product development; Webs, Weebly and Squarespace come to mind. I would say at this point, small brick and mortar businesses are the most viable market target for a product like this.

Additionally, it might be worth investing a small sum to recreate the UXD, or at minimum reduce the use of gradients and move toward a more simplistic approach graphically. The center gradient overload is almost migraine inducing.

Other than that, I truly hope he's successful with the amount of work and personal funds which he's put in.

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