joshsharp

[1]: https://exist.io

Even the macros look very similar. Surely this has drawn inspiration from Elixir.

I'm really interested to see where Elixir is going, and to try building something real with it. I'll probably use Phoenix, just because it's the most active, mature framework. (I like the look of Dynamo - https://github.com/dynamo/dynamo - but not sure how active it is.)

For what it's worth, we use Stripe so we don't actually have your credit card details (which is a relief to us too) and we give you ample notice before the trial is up so you can avoid a surprise charge.

The one exception is mood tracking, where you reply to an email every night and manually rate your day.

It's listed here on Side Projectors: https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/756 but email address is in my bio if you want to discuss it outside there.

Rescue Time and some productivity trackers are coming once we're happy we've done a decent job on our initial focus of health and fitness. Which is hopefully not too far off.

Doing a startup in your spare time is really, really hard. We could've launched months ago but with limited time we're forced to keep pushing back. There are benefits to this — it keeps you really lean, because you just don't have time for all the little extras. But I'd still rather have more time, especially in big blocks. Our main time is evenings and weekends, which limits us severely.

Belle works full-time for Buffer doing content, and they're incredibly supportive of us and Exist. Working for a startup who have been there not so long ago is probably one of the points to mention which make this more sustainable. Belle's time is flexible as she works remotely, meaning she can make time in her day for meetings, emails, etc., and still be able to complete her work for Buffer.

And I'm freelancing at the moment, meaning my time is just as flexible (in theory — if you're flat-out, that doesn't mean much).

I think edw519's points are good complement in terms of actually building your product and managing your time.

For the moment we're starting small and just trying to pull in activity tracker data (Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings etc) and some secondary services that provide useful quantifiable data - things like Foursquare checkins, Gmail, task management tools, productivity trackers, etc. It's hard to interface with every service when you're writing custom API clients for each of them. And on the other hand, if you try to dictate a common standard without any clout to back it up, you just end up with http://xkcd.com/927/. We're working on an API to export all your data too, so people can build visualisations and apps on the aggregates of their data.

Tracking things has to be as frictionless as possible, so I'm wary of manual tracking unless you're already quite committed, or it takes mere seconds - the interface in #2 looks like a good way to approach this. But we're avoiding this for now.

The other thing we strongly agree on is #4 - you need insights, not just data! Numbers alone are of limited value, and a lot of people already into Quantified Self end up with "number fatigue" where they're no longer motivated to put in the effort to track things, let alone work towards a goal, just so they can see the number go up. People need to qualify their data and make it part of a narrative about their life. They also need actionable feedback, which is where we're trying to focus on providing value - if you're trying to be more productive, on which days is that working, and what are the factors behind it? We'll try and tell you so you can focus on that. Same process for becoming more active or anything else.

It's a big problem to solve, but so many possibilities too.

For reference, this is actually a Buffer blog post: http://blog.bufferapp.com/10-scientifically-proven-ways-to-m...

Not necessarily, this is just speculation.

While designing for profitability is definitely the better way to create a product, there are plenty of successes which have simply aimed for millions of users and figured out their monetisation strategy afterwards. This seems particularly true for "social" products. It may have worked for blaster.fm, it may not. We can't know.

The problem with saying "you're almost there, you need marketing" is that I am done. I don't have the effort for marketing. I started the site for fun, to scratch an itch, and that has passed. Maybe I'm close, but in all likelihood I could've done everything right and still got nowhere. I need to draw a line in the sand, and this is it.

However, it's nice to have people acknowledge that the problem is most likely marketing oriented, rather than a fault with the site.

It is a pretty nice site.

I agree that Flippa buyers are mostly concerned with sites that are making a profit, and I'm not sure blaster.fm is a good fit for its market. Having said that, if it's only worth a couple hundred dollars, I'd rather just not sell it.

I think I would put it under what pg called "a dangerous bad idea" (can't remember the exact wording) because it initially looks like a good idea - hey, a social network for music! I might use that - but turns out to be built on a false premise.

It's definitely possible, but you're always going to need a provider for song metadata (album art, album name, artist details etc). If you move from last.fm you'd have to find someone else to provide the corresponding data.