I have yet to pass the willing-to-pay barrier, but my experience launching Cursive has really echoed his first two points. Developers really appreciate attention to detail in a product and my experience working with the beta testers has been that most of them are willing to spend a lot of time helping find and fix bugs and are generally a really friendly and accommodating bunch. Plus I'm scratching my own itch all day - it doesn't get better than that.
What percentage of your motivation for writing this post was a desire to talk about making products for coders in general and what percentage was wanting people to check out your site?<p><a href="http://www.enginehere.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.enginehere.com</a><p>Be honest :)