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garrettdimonon Work/Life Balance

It's different for everybody. It's better to focus on what's sustainable for you personally rather than a specific quantity of hours.

garrettdimonon Starting is easier than sustaining.

I agree. However, it's just a theme that I purchased. I'll have to look into doing some custom CSS to see if I can easily remove it.

garrettdimonon Starting is easier than sustaining.

Thanks! However, it should be noted that in this case, I simply purchased a Tumblr theme by WooThemes. I've been hoping and hoping that I'd find time to do my own design, but all of my free time goes toward Sifter. So it ended up being a theme or nothing at all.

garrettdimonon Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Big

Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) started out as a side project. It was literally just something fun for me to fill my time with until a handful of people encouraged me to actually try to build a business out of it. Within about 18 months of launching it was able to support me full-time.

During that 18 months, there were times where it was rather stressful to work full to part-time on another job and manage a web application that's supposed to be up 24x7.

However, I would definitely say that if anybody else is in that tough spot before your side project can support you full-time, it's definitely worth fighting through it.

garrettdimonon Ask HN: What's up with all these services charging $10/$15 a month?

It's important to remember that "expensive" is relative. Depending on an individual's income or company's revenue, $10/$15 can be huge difference or just a drop in the bucket. When a business is billing out consultants at $150/hr, spending even $100/mo on something that makes employees more productive or efficient is generally a good decision.

It's important to not only look at the cost of the product but also the benefits that it provides. Do the benefits outweigh the costs to the degree that you're comfortable spending the money?

To put it another way, it's more useful to think about the value of the tool relative to the price. It's less about whether a given dollar amount is "expensive", and more about whether the value exceeds the cost.

For example, all told, we gladly pay upwards of $200/mo for hosted services that are not necessary to run our business. However, the value that we receive from that money far exceeds the dollar amount that we spend on them. So in this case, even though $200 isn't insignificant, the dollar amount alone isn't relevant. We consider the services "inexpensive" because the value relative to the price is amazing for us.