I think there were ways you could have derived a solid income from the Tavern and I often wondered why, instead of wasting time stressing about lack of money, you didn't build up some sort of small design shop - I'm certain that you knew more about WordPress than the vast majority of people making a living from it, and you certainly would have had a lot of support, endorsements and referrals from the rest of the community.

The Tavern's magic ingredient was the podcast because no-one else was doing a decent WordPress one at the time. Your personality suited the format, playing a friendly "everyman" encouraging guests to explain their work in an accessible way.

That same approach did not provide a strong enough voice for your written pieces, particularly the long but infrequent posts you seemed to favor - as Twitter was exploding at around the same time, you would have been far better off opting for shorter but far more frequent posts, in the style now adopted by Brian Krogsgard's PostStat.us, and allowing retweets to drive your growth.

You could then have flowed that traffic, from both the podcast and the tweets, into your forum and, instead of wasting time painfully formulating those long articles, you could have applied your friendly personality to growing your community.

A key mistake was forking the discussion, with many of your existing commenters sticking to the WordPress comments, while others stuck to the forum and there did not seem to be much crossover. You should have replaced the comments beneath each news item with a matching forum thread, allowing users to browse the site in either way, but uniting the comments. You needed that momentum because the community-generated content would soon have relieved the pressure on you and you could, perhaps, have recruited enthusiastic members to help you keep the newsfeed fed.

vBulletin was a bad choice for a forum serving the WordPress community because this was so soon after they had been purchased by those fucking gangsters from Internet Brands, who promptly screwed over their users. Any Open Source alternative would have been better and would have been easier to integrate with WordPress in the way I suggest above but, then again, I can also understand why it seemed like the most professional option at the time, an investment in your business.

I am grateful for the time and effort you put into serving the community and was delighted when I heard how Matt arrived at the purchase figure - that doesn't happen very often in business, you should take that as just about the most sincere compliment someone can pay another person and you utterly deserved that gesture, good karma all round!