Man would I ever! I love having workflows laid out.

Have you seen Rich Schefren's Business Building Presentation (I know, I
know, linking in comments is in poor taste but it's not even my website) -

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-784433…

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-784433… point he
makes is at about the 50 minute mark: if you can't describe what you're
doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

And of course, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't outsource it!

The whole presentation I think is something you'll relate to and enjoy.
It's about an hour and a half, so grab some popcorn and a notepad . I
downloaded it and have it on my laptop, I continue to get value out of it -
so dense, and sometimes, so obvious once he explains it.

Well done on the donations and riling up fans, that's a prime tactic and it's a valuable one too, I'm encouraged and humbled by it. I tested out a few contests earlier with this blog to see how managing and response was…the post got 50 tweets, which is pretty big for here. Anyway, glad you took the time to comment, drop me a line anytime…lets commiserate!

I think you're right on with executing being the key, but for me sales and marketing is where I am most concerned right now for my own products. The reason is I know I can execute on writing my product (slowly been plodding along, heh) but sales and marketing is something that I'm not very well versed in – and that is going to take me some effort.

I would like to outsource it, and the issue isn't whether I'm willing to – the real issue is I have no idea if I would get my money's worth. I find that for me I do have to do it once or twice just so I know what needs to be done, otherwise I have no way to gauging if someone did a good job. This may not be true for evertyhing, and perhaps this is just a fault of mine where I don't outsource with assistants as effectively as I could. It's easier for me with simple tasks where I have a single project in or out – but a broad item like “market the product” is a bit tougher to judge, until the end where it sells or bombs – and who wants to have it bomb just to get my money back from an assistant

You are absolutely correct though. There is virtually a market for anything. With over 400 million people on Facebook alone it is going to be hard to pick a niche or product that can not earn you money. The problem is finding those people and compellling them to visit your site. Right now, instead of email lists, I'm working on building my fan page on facebook up (next week I will offer the promo of: for every person who becomes a fan, I will donate $1 to kiva.org). I'm hopeing for good results. It's definitely a slow process, but I figure if you can do only 1 thing a day to improve your site, product, page rank – what have you – then you are at least 1 step closer to your goal of financial freedom. We are both at a very exciting stage in the development of our businesses. I always assumed I wasn't alone on my struggles ( I 'knew' every business owner goes through these stages) but it's really refreshing to read about your progress and see how similar it is to mine.