MeoMix420

I saw some discussions earlier today surrounding http://flatuicolors.com/ and http://www.flatuicolorpicker.com/. This got me thinking about my color choices and I wanted to get some opinions.

I use several of the colors listed on Flat UI: alizarin, nephritis, and sun flower. I often need a lighter/darker variant of the colors. To do this, I apply LESS' "lighten" and "darken." My colors end up looking like:

    @baseBlue: rgb(78,166,234);
    @lightBaseBlue: lighten(@baseBlue, 30%);
    @darkBaseBlue: darken(@baseBlue, 10%);

    //  http://flatuicolors.com/
    @nephritis: rgb(39,174,96);
    @lightNephritis: lighten(@nephritis, 30%);
    @alizarin: rgb(231,76,60);
    @lightAlizarin: lighten(@alizarin, 30%);
    @darkAlizarin: darken(@alizarin, 10%);
    @sunFlower: rgb(241, 196, 15);

Is there any psychological benefit associated with lightening/darkening each color by consistent percentages? Sometimes I feel like a color looks 'off' when lightened. For instance, lightNephritis feels like it has a bit too much blue in it, but I'm happy with nephritis. However, I also feel weird about just choosing a new 'lightGreen' color instead of lightening my base color.

Thoughts?

I never considered myself an entrepreneur. An obsessive software developer, sure, with an inventive side that rears itself every once in a while. Two years ago I began writing a browser extension to fix an annoyance of mine. Nine months ago it was on TechCrunch. Today, it has 140K weekly users and I'm still toiling on the basics. It's unmonetized, just me, and I work on it almost full-time. Two days a week I contract for my previous employer to pay for necessities, but, other than that, I'm focused on my software.

I've learned a ton of great practices and I have no regrets about spending my days learning the finer points of writing quality code. That said, I can't help but think I'm not doing this "correctly." The start-up world feels so fast-paced. Grow quickly, get funded, exit, pivot, or die. I don't think that's quite for me. I'm just trying to make software I'm proud of, software I want to use.

What actions should I be considering? Should I just stay the course? My ideas for monetization require more coding power and have no validation behind them other than a hunch. The product fulfills a small enough niche as to make investors shy. I don't blame them, their fears are warranted. I wouldn't know what to do with an investment if I got one, anyway.

Is anyone a veteran of going down this path? What are steps I can take to grow my product when my brain is too exhausted to code?

Hey everyone,

I'm a young developer with a penchant for music and quality software. I have spent the last 16 months developing an open-source Google Chrome extension which attempts to simplify the experience of using YouTube to play music.

Streamus: http://streamus.com/

Streamus currently has 14,000 users and is the #1 trending / #4 ranked 'fun' extension in the web store. I've built it entirely from scratch while teaching myself the basics of BackboneJS (and Backbone.Marionette), RequireJS, GruntJS and many other, smaller libraries. It has been a great learning experience.

I would love to field any questions about the product, challenges encountered while creating it, etc. Really anything you'd like to know -- I'm all ears and super excited to discuss it.

Here's all the source code if that's your thing:

  https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension
  https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusWebsite
  https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusServer