TJ, you and I are both good enough coders to given a reasonable amount of time, we can create whatever is out there on the Internet. Login forms, automated emails, geographic searches, we’ve done it all and what we haven’t, we can figure out. For me personally, I have maxed out amount I want to be up at 4am learning new technologies. At a certain point, you wake up and realize that everything around you is data and it’s a matter of moving it or holding it in a place until you need it again.
The next important skill for us to master is promotion. If I had to guess, I’d bet that all of your work in the promotion/marketing side of things has been handled by other people. Mine has. Either there is a team to do that sort of thing and it’s abstracted far away from me or the owner of the business is the thing and already taking care of things. As weekend coding entrepreneurs, we can’t pass that responsibility to someone else. It’s in our hands. It’s the reason why we talk about Flickr and Facebook and Google instead three other web sites. A product has to fit the user experience for the task it tries to achieve and that product has to be promoted.
My goal for 2008 is to get better at promoting things. SEO, word of mouth, guerrilla techniques, whatever it takes to get good products in front of people who need them.
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