"First, there’s a Jekyll plugin that hooks into the site’s build step... Second, there’s an “agent” script that gets added to the post’s <head>..." And then there has to be a whole payment system to handle the subscriptions, which is apparently separate.
This requires support and hand-holding to get it to work. It's nice to be able to host your own paid-subscription blog, but it's inherently complicated to get that to work. It's so much easier to sign up for some service that does the whole job. Especially just for a blog.
This is also why most "federated" systems don't get traction. Per-user, it's so much more work than a centralized system.
Three months is nothing and marketing and getting traction is hard.
This is pretty cool. But i guess the market is too small. Maybe if handled the payments and it has support for more than just jekyll.
Is anyone using Jekyll these days?
My wife had a startup (B2B) which in the beginning had no traction. It took some years until big companies could be sold too, that had said "go away" just two years earlier. She successfully sold her startup after some years.
The last invoice she (she was Head of Sales) sent out was 10000x the amount of the first invoice.
3 months seems very short. But this is the reason why innovation fails in large companies. They start a project, after 12 months it only has sales of $100k, the company makes $1B, so the project makes no dent. The second year this happens the project gets killed. They forget they need to stick with innovative products for years to make it work, just like startups.
This is part of the Overnight-Success-Fallacy.