A bit more than a month ago, I had the random idea to try building and selling a web site, at the same time.  The idea was that the more people bid, and requested features, the more I'd work on it.

It didn't work out.  I got a bit of money out of it, but  certainly not enough to cover my time at an hourly rate.

I suppose the lesson is that a month simply isn't a lot of time for something to mature: it'd probably be best to work on something on and off for a year, give it some time for traffic to build up, and so on, if the goal is to sell it.

However, in any case, I think I'm pretty convinced that my next projects, like LiberWriter, will involve for-pay products.  At heart, I'm not really a business guy, so picking the simplest possible business model probably makes sense: you pay me, I give you something.

Hopefully, I'll be able to write about those in the "you win some column", but I thought I'd let people know how the experiment went.