Today I woke up at around 10:30 – which seems kind of slackerish, except that I went to sleep at around 3:30. I answered a few emails. Answering emails seems to be the sort of thing that people don’t plan for when considering The Life. As John Gruber points out:

So the conundrum is this: once a developer gets enough paying users to consider quitting his day job so he can devote full-time effort to writing code, he’s quite possibly got so many paying users that he’ll spend much of his time helping customers in ways other than writing code.

I don’t have any paying users yet since I haven’t released WebnoteHappy as shareware, but I do have a free version in WebnoteHappy Lite. I get an average two emails a day, so I still have lots of time to program though this varies on how much time I’ve got that day. After the 1.0 release for instance, I couldn’t do any programming for 2 days because I got a lot of email and I only had 3-4 hours to work with.

Some of the emails are actual technical support but these are becoming rarer. This is partly because I had a very long beta cycle and great beta testers which left only some minor and obscure bugs in the 1.0. Its also partly because I kept the Lite release focused in functionality.

Right now a majority of the emails come in two flavors: suggestions and encouragement. Many times, they’re in the same email. This is really great in my opinion. The suggestions help me figure out what people want without spending a lot on focus groups or surveys.

But the best part is the encouragement. I fully expected to do the sort of starving, unappreciated artist bit for a while before anyone stood up and took notice. But Mac Enthusiasts are a wonderful group of people and really supportive. In the dark recesses of the night, when most of DC slumbers and I think – hmmm maybe I’ll just stop for now – I look at some of the email or blog entries that compliment my work on WebnoteHappy. Then I smile and keep going.

After answering emails, I spent an hour and a half at lunch today which was well worth it since I spent it with my wife and kids. Plus afterwards I picked up a case of Coca-cola for my caffeine fix. Later on, one of my crack team of beta testers spotted a bug in the latest private beta and I got that fixed up. Then I improved the Keychain integration. I’ll be back later tonight…