I work best when I work solo.

I partenered on a project but it’s too difficult for me. Communication is hard, we do not have same values and expectations. And not at all the same mentality and way of seeing things/work.

In the end I lose more energy on this project where I am not solo, and move much much faster (and with less frustration) on the solo projects.

If I was 100% sure the users would really be interested in the product and would be my target, yes I would.

But I won’t be 100% sure and that would probably looks too scammy, so no.

I have been a pretty similar situation 2 years ago. Working 4 days a week for my employer, the boss was great and would accept anything we asked for and really trusted us in our work, giving us full autonomy. On the side I was building my company (bootstrapped, no funding).

At some point I needed more time for my company, and decided to quit. My boss offered me to continue working for them as a contractor, 2 days a week.

The first year was great and I effectively worked 2 days a week for them, the rest on my company. This year (the second year), they had a bit less work so it most of the time was just one day a week. Still not sure if I will accept to continue next year as the job is changing a bit.

But one thing is sure, I did not regret doing it this way. Also it was a security that if my company failed, I still have this contract as a backup. And also as our collaboration continued in very good terms, I know that even if I totally quit today, they would take me back full time later if I needed work.

My feeling is that you should try an other market. When I want to hire a painter, I don’t really care about his website, so I don’t see how it would be interesting for him to pay that money.

However, when I plan to go to a restaurant, I always check their website to see the menu and prices. If I had to start a web desgin agency selling static websites for a small monthly fee, this is the industry I would target.

If you both solve exactly the same problem, why would you sell it for just $10 when he can sell it for $199?

From experience, it’s easier to find 1 customer at $100 than 10 customers at $10. Also, I have noticed that customers who pay a cheap price require more support (questions, complaints, feature requests) than those paying a high price.

Planning the work to be done for the whole week.30min of planning max (ideally already done on Sunday, but not always possible).

And once the planning is done, it’s time to build and ship!

As a solo dev, forget B2C and go for B2B.
There is more money to be made, and it’s easier to cold email/call companies to sell your product.
Also companies usually don’t care about paying a few hundreds bucks per month for your product if you solve a problem. It’s just a small expense on a budget, so they just buy, it’s much easier than B2C!

I have always found that marketing a marketplace is more difficult because if one side is missing, it’s not interesting for the other side to join. And then you are stuck because it’s exactly the same for the other side.

What I have done in the past is to add features that could be useful to side A, without the marketplace system. Then you will have A users joining (that come for the already available features). It’s then easier to get B users, because what they are looking for is A users and you already have them and now you can start providing value with your marletplace.