Left my job in 2020 to do the same. Nowhere near as profitable as OP, but now make enough to cover rent + basic expenses in New York. Crucially: I didn't want to do hypeman social media content that (a) sold the dream of solopreneur as a marketing tactic, or (b) added excessive noise into the ether.
I'm not saying Tony did either -- I haven't followed along -- but certainly a lot of people do. I can't fully blame the people who do, though.
Anyway. The project I've built [1] is still going, and I feel proud of it on merits of software: that it pushes the bounds, however slightly; that it feels good to exist in the world; and that I genuinely care for the people using it.
All that's to say: I think there's a software solopreneur path that doesn't involve excessive hype, gross self-promotion (some degree of self-branding is necessary though), while allowing you to work by principles and also explore interesting software problems.
Feel free to DM me [2] if you have questions, or are interested in bootstrapping your own project. Especially consumer-facing. I do have some writing online [3] that covers this too.
Thank you. Unfortunately, my experience is the same: it's hard to promote a software project on today's Internet without investing a lot of money or spending 4 hours/day on social media like the original poster did. There are many interesting projects like yours that remain invisible to their potential users.
* Those hotkeys should work (follows Figma's example).
* A very high priority.
* Yeah... I plan to let people disable click (e.g. pointer-events: none) on elements, but automatically detecting transparent overlapping areas is a bit more work.
Ohh. I misread this. I thought you meant auto-save the editor. Now my response seems glib. Absolutely -- I should at least warn people when they try to exit the drawing view.
Currently working on the ability to copy and paste the underlying blocks into your own editor (with owner’s permission) —- big believer in popping the hood!
Long term dream is to have the HTML output look good enough that people can edit at both WYSIWYG and code levels.
Re: laggy. I know... 1.0 introduced new features but also inefficiencies. The cost of working on something solo. Releasing a patch soon.