I'm the solo founder of an MMO guild hosting company (5 years and counting as of this past May), which was doing quite well years ago ($90k+/year), but is now much less busy. The site: http://www.dkpsystem.com.
Honestly, I blame the fact that I've had almost the opposite mentality as the 37 Signals guys, where I've added most of the features my customers ask for, thus making the system more complicated than it should be. But then again, I feel guilty taking some of those features away were I to do such.
That said, it still provides a meager living for limited work (10 hours a month or so) while I work on my up-and-coming projects: Sports league management websites (http://www.BracketPal.com). I'm targeting bar-league volleyball initially. As an avid beach volleyball player, this is my new calling. And it's giving me the ability to work with businesses who won't balk at higher figures (unlike my MMO customers who will balk at anything above $10/mo), and cold-calling, though I still get a little bit of the "sweats" before each call, I end up enjoying the conversation.
My results so far are looking very positive for this upcoming spring.
Cold calling has been surprisingly fruitful. I'm getting about a 70% success rate for setting up an in-person meeting. Granted, all have been in the Milwaukee area, so setting up a meeting is more "personal" than the next logical step, which will be trying to set up remote meetings with a screen-cap demo. That might be much more difficult. For now, when I start calling places about 50-100 miles away, I'll give them the option to do a tele-meeting, otherwise, I'll gladly drive down there.
Honestly, I blame the fact that I've had almost the opposite mentality as the 37 Signals guys, where I've added most of the features my customers ask for, thus making the system more complicated than it should be. But then again, I feel guilty taking some of those features away were I to do such.
That said, it still provides a meager living for limited work (10 hours a month or so) while I work on my up-and-coming projects: Sports league management websites (http://www.BracketPal.com). I'm targeting bar-league volleyball initially. As an avid beach volleyball player, this is my new calling. And it's giving me the ability to work with businesses who won't balk at higher figures (unlike my MMO customers who will balk at anything above $10/mo), and cold-calling, though I still get a little bit of the "sweats" before each call, I end up enjoying the conversation.
My results so far are looking very positive for this upcoming spring.