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It's been a while since I've written about my development experiment, downwind.com.au so I thought that I'd relate some of my more recent experiences. I hope that it helps you in your own developmental efforts.
 As many of you know Downwind is a site that I developed for the aviation community in Australia and it now receives in excess of 8,000 pilots to it each month. At the moment Downwind offers a lot of functionality for pilots and the aviation industry but while it generates some revenue it hasn't taken the next step in growth.
This is really the problem with development. Everything from a technical perspective is working but in order to grow financially it's going to take people power and physical effort. For instance, Downwind has unsold advertising inventory that needs to get sold, it's identified a number of areas to exploit for greater revenue that look very promising and definitely needs considerable thought around migrating users from "free" to "paid" in some fashion. All this takes time.
So at the moment I'm on the edge of hiring someone to do sales versus keeping the site as a great hobby that can fund my aviation passion. Ultimately, I think that I'll hire a person but once again, finding the right person requires time and effort that for me is better spent in ParkLogic.
If you ever end up developing a site you will encounter these exact issues and in many ways no level of automation (I've done a lot of this) can assist in developing personal relationships with your market. I've tried quite a number of possible outsourcing of advertising but they fail miserably compared to what I know is possible. Before anyone suggests adsense I've tried that as well. So it looks like hiring is the answer....sigh.
I'd love any feedback on what others have experienced and what they have done to overcome this barrier.
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