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October 19th, 2009
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Going All In

Nate Weiner - Posted in Blog, , ,

Today, I am taking on Read It Later, iPhone development and Idea Shower projects full-time.

Two years ago, I worked for a small web design agency in the Twin Cities and on one random night after work I built a little project.  A few months later I decided that I really liked making these little projects and made the call to leave my job and focus more time on my projects while doing contract work part time.

I had big plans.

And I started off strong.

But as the last two years have gone by, in order to make a living, I found myself working full time on contract work and having little time to apply to my own ideas.  And again, two years later, I have found myself seemingly in the exact same place again.

However, this time, one thing is different.  That little project I started 2 years ago has started to do something I never planned on: it started making money.  It’s not enough to quit working and live on an island and it’s not enough to cover my previous contract income, but it is enough to make me believe that I can finally get to where I wanted to be all along: making a living from users, not clients.

It is not going to be easy.  Yet, as nervous as I am to take this risk, I’ve found that in my short 25 years on this planet, I’ve never regretted doing something.  My only regrets have ever come from not trying something.  In the end, if I fall, I can pick myself up and try something else.

Idea Shower is coming back.  I’ll be launching the 2.0 version of Read It Later (which is going to rock, I’ll have you know), and then I’ll be moving onto 3 other projects I plan to launch within the next 6 months.

Stay tuned.

Comments (30)


  1. Congratulations on going full-time, Nate. You’re living the dream that all indie developers have.

    October 19th, 2009 Marco Arment
  2. Congratulations and good luck!

    October 19th, 2009 autumnmist
  3. Thanks Marco, much appreciated.

    October 19th, 2009 Nate Weiner
  4. Exciting times. Congratulations for making the jump!

    October 19th, 2009 Ed
  5. Congratulations and good luck! I wish you the best pursuing a dream I feel a lot of us wish we could try for!

    October 19th, 2009 Dan
  6. Based on the look and feel of RIL, I think you’re going to have great success. Best of luck!

    October 19th, 2009 Kevin T.
  7. Best wishes for the future; I hope it all works out for you.

    October 19th, 2009 kieran
  8. Congratulations, brave move which I am sure not everyone is willing to take! Looking forward to the next version of RIL, an application I cant imagine living without ;-)
    Greetings from Vienna, Austria
    Robert

    October 19th, 2009 Robert
  9. Congrats! You’ve never met me, but Read it later on firefox and on the iPhone really changed the way I work and cope with information overflow on the web. Didn’t hesitate for a second to buy the pro iPhone version.

    Keep up the awsome work, and best of luck.

    October 19th, 2009 Shai Inbal
  10. Good luck and please bring Read-It-Later to my Sony Reader!

    October 19th, 2009 tim
  11. I wish you all the luck.

    October 20th, 2009 Vidyasagar
  12. Appreciate all the hard work bro! Great add-on for Firefox at the very least. I install it on EVERYONE’S machine that I work on…

    October 20th, 2009 Matt Walker
  13. Congratulations! RIL has become so essential in my life that I barely part with it at all (work, on the road, etc) I am surprised that RIL is able to generate revenue at all.

    October 21st, 2009 EDALBNUG
  14. Man….sometimes you have to hurt to feel good. Congratulations. Don’t stop believing!!!! And I hate Steve Perry.

    October 21st, 2009 robert
  15. Congratulations. I hope this works out for you. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next as I love RIL.

    October 21st, 2009 Drew
  16. First, congratulations. I did something similar at about the same age and, although I never got rich, it made a HUGE difference in my life and my career. Here’s hoping you better financial success and at least the same level of personal success that I did.

    A suggestion: I noticed that there is no iGoogle gadget for RIL. I would very much like to have one, and I suspect that it would give you much greater exposure, especially if it gets picked up into the various recommendation lists (e.g. Life Hacker, etc.) which I feel relatively certain it would. This would allow me to RIL something, then have it popup on my homepage in the morning or evening and remind me that I’ve got something to read.

    Good luck and God bless!

    October 23rd, 2009 Don
  17. Well CONGRATULATIONS!!! i wish you the best of lucks. you deserve success.

    Saludos y felicidades desde México

    October 24th, 2009 DiegoDD
  18. Congratulations and good luck! RIL is great, and thanks to your decision it become even better:]

    Pozdrowienia z Polski:]

    October 26th, 2009 Bogumil
  19. nice to here, congrats

    October 26th, 2009 brendon
  20. ok, i will buy your app!

    October 30th, 2009 sebasong
  21. Good luck Nate, and let me know when you need some German translation again, as I did for Read It Later!

    November 2nd, 2009 Not A Niche
  22. A thought or two from an entrepreneur:
    The number one reason people who have a paycheck don’t go out on their own is “Risk”-its not fear of failure etc. if anything its the fear of fear or fear of “disquiet.” 25 years old seems like an eternity, a place to judge how am I doing?, or look how far they’ve gotten or my income was x and I’ve slid backwards, wasted time, found disappointment etc.

    That’s not the way it works out here. Its a zigzag path, requiring a number of traits but of interest-listening, observing and ultimately “presence”-coming from that place you will find everything that occurs to be “feedback” and now that you are aware of what is coming at you you have significantly increased your chances for success. If this seems unnecessarily oblique all the better; it took “presence” to discover that.

    Good luck and go for it.

    November 5th, 2009 Long View
  23. i bought your app today for my iPhone

    it is excellent@
    thanks alot@

    November 8th, 2009 Tony
  24. I was contemplating which offline reader to install. It was between RIL and Instapaper. Well after i saw your dedication to your new project i’ll be purchasing RIL after work today. Keep up the good work and hope you have enough to live on a island soon. Take care best wishes.

    November 8th, 2009 Ramesh
  25. Good Luck! :o)

    November 10th, 2009 Yonas
  26. Awesome, wishing you all the very best of luck with it!
    I was talking to a friend today about how I wanted to ’star’ websites for later reading (sites I don’t read from and thus cannot star in Google Reader) without bookmarking them - I want a ‘newspaper’ page, or rss feed at the least. So we threw around some ideas, submitting and pulling rss etc. Then I found RIL.

    You’ve saved me hours of work and made my week!

    November 10th, 2009 David
  27. Good luck and thanks for the amazing app! I plug it into every other app that will take it and it’s really changing my internet habits (for the way better). :)

    November 11th, 2009 Johan
  28. Coming onto this thread late but I just wanted to say good luck as well! I hope you keep all of us RIL users as well as your other fans in the loop so we know how you’re doing!

    November 15th, 2009 Malcolm Bastien
  29. Congratulations on creating a winning product! I am pretty much in the same boat as you were years ago. I love to work on my own small projects (applications and websites), but I don’t have the time because of financial constraints.

    Currently, I am trying to get into contract work under my own business name. I’m hoping it can pay the bills and offer some exiting projects as well.

    My hats off to you, it isn’t easy to make money on the internet. My best wishes for version 3, and I love your Read-It-Later plugin. Keep up the good work!

    January 5th, 2010 Steven
  30. Oops, meant version 2.0.

    January 5th, 2010 Steven

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