While Eldarion has taken a couple of small angel rounds over the years that we are grateful for, we are for the most part, self funded and that gives us a lot of latitude when it comes to how we operate the company.
For example, Gondor.io is a PaaS offering that came from our need to host our apps. We were able to productize a solution that we'd come up with to solve our own problem, and turned that into a revenue stream.
Thought Streams was born out of trying to solve a problem that we had tracking thoughts and ideas over time, and was something we felt that others might want to use as well.
In both cases, we never had any intention of either of these solutions trying to compete with things like Heroku or Twitter.
In both cases, we simply put something together that solved a problem for us and shared it with the world.
The longevity or fate of either platform is not in the hands of investors or board members telling us we need to find our market, pivot or fold. We're doing these things because they worked for us first then found a following in a broader sense. As long as they continue to work for us and the people outside of Eldarion who choose to benefit from them, we'll keep them going, growing and evolving.
It's about the simple notion that if we're having a problem and we've got a solution, let's share it and see if others can benefit from it as well.
We can do this because we find ourselves in the fortunate position of not being slaves to overly demanding investors or a board, to playing the startup game, or clinging to the hope that one of these things may turn into a unicorn.