How slow is acceptable to you? I've been working with Communick (managed provider for Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix) as a side project for almost five years, and my main focus for over an year, and I am yet at the point where I can barely pay the operational costs.
I kept thinking it was just a problem with my execution, but from looking around it seems that no one has managed to turn this market segment (people/companies who care about privacy and want to run their own servers but are not technical enough to run on their own) into a strong customer base.
I kept telling myself "any day now", but the bitter truth is that the majority of people simply don't care. Those that care about control will run things themselves. Those that just want to be on the alternative networks are going to look for the free instances with open registrations, and just move on when they (inevitably) crumble due to lack of support. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg will just execute on his playbook: clone the competitors on the innovative parts for Threads and use FB's size to make ActivityPub into something that favors them so that they can become the AWS of social media.
Well, if you have some other revenue through some full-time then any time horizon is fine, but is it really fair to put yourself in the same type of conversation as your competitors who've raised money?
Cockroaches are also likely to survive all sorts of catastrophic events, yet we don't think of them as somehow competing with us.
I'm not trying to engage in a battle of wits. I'm just saying that there is no win for you by outliving these competitors. The idea for you (I hope) is to turn your business into something that can be your main business and not something you do on the side "just in case".
If you think in terms of ROI, how long are you willing to keep working on this without it being profitable? Ok if you say "5 to 10 years", but if you say "as long as I can", then this is not a venture, this is just a nice hobby.
Well, what problem are you solving, for whom? If the problem is not that big, then no amount of time spent working on it will make it successful, as it would be fundamentally limited by the market.
Yeah, that's exactly the issue: I thought that enough people had seen the extent of damage caused by Surveillance Capitalism. I thought that a large enough percentage of these people would be willing to pay a for social media / messaging services and treat it as an utility.
Turns out that the market is there but it's just too small to sustain its own economy. The questions are now then (1) how much shittier will things have to become for this market to grow? (2) how long is it going to take for us to get there, if ever? and (3) even if we do get there, will I ever be able to get enough customers on this market or will I just be witnessing people jumping from one bandwagon to another?
The idea is improving on uptime monitoring/status pages. It's a slow business to build, but it works.
I have friends doing the same for email platforms, web analytics, and more. Just be slightly better.