Darkroom

Hey y'all! Excited to be back on Product Hunt! Hit me with any questions you have, happy to answer anything you have about Darkroom, the app, the process, the market, or what I think of your grandmother's Rigatoni.

@chrismessina Haha sorry, I got so excited about being excused from jury duty and not slipping on Darkroom 2's deadline that I just got back to work :P Let's see, 1-2 unexpected things I learned building Darkroom 2? hmmm..... *stares longingly out the window* I learned something about myself working on Darkroom 2: I learned that I hate/suck at working by myself. Turns out, I use conversation to string together thoughts and priorities, and absent any other people to talk to about the design constraints, the technical challenges, and the branding/marketings lessons I had to learn, I spun in my own head. Ultimately, have a close set of casual advisors who acted as soundboards helped relieve some of this pressure, but it's a sprint I don't want to recreate if I can avoid. Having people around helps in many intangible ways. What else? One of the lessons I'm still trying to parse and figure out is regarding the management of stress and ups-and-downs of starting a company. It's easy to treat a product like Darkroom like a side-project, and many who build them do, but that's not the goal here. Darkroom is a long term, full-time commitment, but it has to succeed as a business, and when you're starting out, independent and without the resources of a large VC-round, your runway is always short, and you can't spend too much time thinking about the long term when the short term is so uncertain. At some point, this short-term thinking makes the day-to-day emotional journey tough to tackle, because you lack the certainty and runway to weather them. Traveling copious amounts during the development of Darkroom 2 helped deal with some of this :)

Thanks @jtaby for the detailed 2.0 writeup! Good coverage too.