Had a flash of inspiration yesterday where I thought "I should really put a lot of effort into Base Styles and all the HTML First stuff". Called Ciaran and he confirmed he's super excited to start working on it too next year. This morning I evolved that thinking more and fleshed it out further, including this document - some snippets:

• Goal: Become The Go To Place to help people build great software without javascript Meta Frameworks

• Structure: Current html-first.com becomes html-first.com/manifesto, then we add things like libraries, patterns, resources, course, playbooks, "play" (similar to tailwind play) etc etc.

This path is super exciting because it 100% marries my passion/hobby work with my commercial focus, but I/we also want to become quite wealthy and this is almost certainly not the most direct way to do that. But as I type this I am questioning myself and thinking things like "But you want to have purpose and be recognised for your ideas", and "This is the Joe Hudson 'follow your calling' laid out as clear as can be in front of you"

I began brainstorming with Claude about a realistic path to making 7 or 8 figures a la Taylor Otwell and Adam Wathan. And it does seem quite hard. Anyone who has done it started with years and years of credibility building first,

Conclusion/s:

Jumping straight to trying to make this the high 7 figure thing isn't likely to end well. Building large businesses around this stuff requires establishing more credibility and realistically releasing free stuff that people use organically first before attempting to monetize.

At the same time, we've done an enormous amount of work such that we're not very far away from having numerous valuable resources to share and/or make available for purchase.

So a realistic set of next steps might be

• Finish out base styles and some of the more complex mini js components. Launch this as a paid package alongside a figma UI kit.

• After that, look at additional projects & initiatives like courses etc.