Adios DoLeaf
My wife Sarah and I have sold our interest in DoLeaf to our third partner, Ryan Felton. It's been an interesting ride these past five years, but I'm juggling too many things right now and I need to focus.
I'm still a parallel entrepreneur, running Obsidian Portal (and delivering on our awesome Kickstarter) while trying to be a conscientious co-founder and junior developer at The Agile League. There's enough juggling there to keep me plenty busy.
I can't say that I'm not sad, as I think DoLeaf may be my best product idea so far, and the execution was pretty good from the start. With very little effort we still make some decent sales, and the customers (both the sellers and buyers) have all been happy. There's a significant amount of work to be done, but if Ryan puts in a good effort, I'm sure he will find success there.
I keep thinking that I could have been a part of that success, but I have to be honest with myself. If I haven't put any significant effort into DoLeaf in the past few years, that's not going to change. At any point I could have reoriented my priorities to focus on DoLeaf, but I never did. Rather than dreaming about what might happen, it was time for me to realize that it obviously wasn't important enough and I had to cut the cord.
Ultimately, there is a great mental relief in knowing that I am no longer responsible for executing refunds, sorting out order errors, keeping the server up to date with security issues, deflecting feature requests, and so forth. Managing and growing a business is a lot of work, and right now I'm happy to refocus all that work energy into my other endeavors.
So best of luck to Ryan and DoLeaf. I expect great things!
P.S. Now I can also brag to everyone that I sold my startup and used the proceeds to buy a boat. In truth, I bought a scratched-up, used, whitewater kayak, and it cost a significant chunk of my "exit" money, but maybe I'll just leave that detail out of the story. ;)