I had a similar experience to you 2004-2007 with an RSS-to-everything service called Feed Digest. It started as a way to get my Delicious links onto my blog and eventually turned into my full time job with 25k users. I sold it in 2007 after a number of mistakes on my part: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/257-three-years-ago-i-sold-my-st...
Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.
So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project comfortable to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.
Anyway, the only reason I'm piping up is because I think NewsBlur is cool and I hope you manage to avoid the single bigger killer for my own project.. not charging enough! :-) I earned enough for it to be an OK living but not enough to hire people, get much help, etc, and it turned into a real burnout situation. There wasn't anything like Hacker News to learn from at the time either.
So if you're going full time with this, I wish you the very best of luck but I pray (and I'm not a religious man!) you find a scalable and realistic business model that makes this project comfortable to run, rather than just enough to keep you off the streets, as it were.