Happy to hear that Welder seems meaningful for you. You should definitely give it a try.
Btw thanks for letting me know what convinced you, we are actually in the process of updating the LP and this is valuable feedback.
So when covid thing happened we started on a few side projects as we though it's a great opportunity to build something that will help people in current situation.
We created MVP of app for therapists to do remote sessions, system for creative people to share their thoughts, Slack bot for devs to streamline their workflow and Welder.
Welder took of the most in our validation phase.
We decide to jump full time into it straight away as the demand was big. Few months in we already had paying customers, but the growth was not as fast as we needed.
We started thinking about VC funding, but finally it didn't feel right, we loved the product, but not as much. We didn't feel like it's the next unicorn. We would be lying to the VCs and we didn't want to.
So after 8 months we decided to put it back on side track as we had two options
1) VC capital and boost the generalistic tool as hell > Nope
2) Finding a niche, stick with it, understand it and deliver solution that is different enough from other generalistic competitors who raised (we didn't love it enough and we didn't feel big enough differentiator is there).
Drives the point home! Would love to try it, as I've recorded a podcast with 13 episodes before: https://chdaniel.com/podcast
What made you turn this from side -> main -> side project? What are you working on now, specifically, on Welder?