Taken from an email written by a good friend of mine about the number of downloads for our open source social network platform, Lovd By Less:
Talking to you on Thursday it was obvious that you were genuinely surprised by the success of LovdByLess. The fact that you were surprised is shocking to me. Take the single-most sought out feature in one of the hottest languages of today and have one of the best Rails shops in the country build the functionality, design the site, and bundle it all together for no cost.
Obviously flattering, but from our perspective very far from the mark. We have been genuinely surprised by the number of people who have tried, downloaded and contributed code back to Lovd. There is no guarantee of success. We had an interesting idea have executed well.
Our recipe for success is:
We have been blessed with a lot of good ideas, a really strong work ethic, the ability to see what’s important and stick to it, very understanding families, and luck. Our parents have always supported our careers and have guided, mentored and inspired us. We have occasionally been called arrogant or self-promoting, but truly what we have is a fear of failure. We self-promote because we don’t have any expectation that someone will do it for us. We succeed or our families don’t eat. Just like the rest of you.
Last year I worked over 4000 hours. This year I am trying to keep the number close to 3000.
We work hard. We participate in open source. We blog a lot. We write and act honestly. We try to make things easy for our users and ourselves. Any measure of success that we have or will have comes from these things. We don’t expect to succeed. We just keep trying.
And we are grateful. We are overjoyed that people enjoy our opinions enough to read and subscribe to our blog. That people like our work enough to use our products and ask us to work on their products. That people download our software and contribute back.
Thank you all for allowing us to share ourselves with you. And while we don’t expect it, we do appreciate it.
If you wanted it to build a product you’d find a way to get time to work on it. If you really wanted to start that new hobby you’d sacrifice something to find the time and money to do it.
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