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Interesting, not to get too off topic here but is there a reason you didn't use a 3rd party service for billing like Paypal or something? Sounds like you went 90% of the way and stopped at the last 10.


More like the last 1%. Implementing the billing system would have been trivial. It was a mental block. I just didn't want to completely commit to the business I created.


This sounds like something you could have sold. Did you? What happened?


It ended up here: https://github.com/sfioritto/lookout

No license but I'll throw a BSD license on there later if anyone wants to use it.

Update: It's been a while but I think when I left off I was working on a bug in the Bayes module. The concept was new to me at the time and I was still wrapping my head around it. Also I'm sure the email parsers are out of date at this point.

Basically the whole project was an excuse to learn Bayes rule and use Lamson. Plus people wanted to pay me for it. But once I got the code out, I quickly lost interested as explained above.

EDIT:

A few emails from people interested. Look here for a little more info: http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my-delus...

After this I learned you need to price it for the entry level PR folks to pay for it. Honestly I learned so much after this I think your best bet would be to pick up the phone and chat with PR people to fill in the gaps where I left off on the blog.

After implementing the billing system I was thinking of pivoting out of the PR agency market and into small businesses (who do their own monitoring). I was also looking at ways of gathering alerts without actually using Google Alerts and blatantly violating their TOS.


I read the OP as the billing not being the impediment, but what would come after: A business that the OP had limited interest in running.


90% done, only 90% left.




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