For me, it's something that would have served me (and I would have paid for) in my freelancing days, and it's something that has been working great for me as a small business owner as I've been using the early builds.
I'm obviously incredibly biased (I'm one of the creators), but I agree small business will be a large potential market in addition to freelancers. There will be some freelancers who won't want to put down $7/month, but most busy freelancers would certainly get $7/month of value out of the service.
Aha. Reading your blog post, I notice that you developed this for yourself while you were running a web design shop with 3 other people. That counts as small business rather than "freelancer", in my book. If I were you I'd go and furiously hunt down bona fide freelancers (who have no interest in hiring more people) and corner them as to whether they'd find something like this useful.
I don't think the price is an issue - in fact, $7 is too low, if anything - but whether or not this is worth paying for at all, for a freelancer. It's definitely worth it for a web design shop - but then you need to market to those rather than to freelancers, and make sure you build your product for the right market.
Absolutely--I think I was a bit unclear on that. I'm absolutely in the small biz bucket now, but I think my past freelancer self would have paid for it. But you're right, we have some work to do around finding whether our target is freelance and small biz or only one of those.
I'm obviously incredibly biased (I'm one of the creators), but I agree small business will be a large potential market in addition to freelancers. There will be some freelancers who won't want to put down $7/month, but most busy freelancers would certainly get $7/month of value out of the service.
Here's my blog post about how Stride came about, which has a bit more: http://blog.strideapp.com/post/18976926872/origin-story