121–130 of 235 posts
I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on the OS X app store: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ I'm not getting rich off it, but it usually brings in a few hundred bucks per month and I like hearing from fellow developers who benefit from using it.
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You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are extremely high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to care in that case). You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whate…
Holy crap yes. My wife works in the wedding industry, and being able to manage the music for your entire wedding is worth way more than $5. A DJ will cost something like 50 - 100x that.
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Awesome icon. >>We haven't done any serious research or marketing for it. It could be a personal taste question, but why not any marketing? With enough traction to be paying rent based solely off word-of-mouth and organic, you certainly seem to be creating value for people. There are easy/free/cheap ways to market apps, definitely at least some amount of money being left on the table. Congrats either way, good stuff…
Thanks! Icons are huge on the App Store, an excellent one is a must have. We've done some experimenting with marketing, but couldn't figure out any strategy that could convert a bride or groom for $3.50 (the amount we net after Apple's cut). We tried and abandoned Google ads, Facebook ads, and advertising on wedding blogs. Virtually all app-marketing services focus on free apps, and most of them are grey hat in some…
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In regards to the 401k, I disagree. Unless your employer only offers really crappy funds it's in no way gambling. First off, your employer match is essentially free money. It's foolish to ignore that. The tax benefits can also be significant. For instance, I contribute 25% of my pre-tax salary to my 401k. That works out to $1500 a month but because my taxable income is lowered my monthly net is only decreased by abou…
Indeed. With a historical performance of 9% a year returns and a 100% employer match, you'd have to be pretty pessimistic about the future of the economy to not have a 401k. (Though one could argue that taxes will be higher in the future, and so paying taxes now might be better than paying taxes when you take the distribution.) You don't even have to manage the split yourself, there are plenty of mutual funds that ta…
Halloweenbingocards.net will probably hit about $6k this October (BCC will hit maybe $10k). Not bad for $250 paid in like 2009 or so. I did a course on lifecycle emails for SaaS businesses recently. That did pretty well - a few hundred sales.
How are you monetizing Halloweenbingocards.net ??
This might not be the kind of answer you're looking for, but the best way to truly passively increase your wealth is to take care of your personal finances (e.g. pay off your student loans, pay off your credit card balance, invest in a lifecycle fund, see if your employer offers a 401(k)) I personally really liked the book I Will Teach You To Be Rich -- it has a poor name but it's dense with incredibly practical advi…
I support the idea of paying off debt. 401k (investment groups) however, is essentially giving your money to a gambler, and having him play your hand. Bet on yourself. Always.
This is long, so I apologize in advance, bare with me.
A 401k is NOT a safe investment. People constantly mistake prior history to future events yet there is no causality here. In fact, with QE3 in the wild, the value of your employer matched dollar continues to degrade.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/2012...
The question I ask myself is "What will my dollars be worth at the age of retirement?" and the scenarios I paint continually are ones where I do not like the outcome, should I continue down a traditional 401k path.
@Saryant and @wikwocket's advice is reasonable, if the current model is sustainable. I have personally decided that it is not. This is just me. No hard feelings guys/gals. I just don't trust someone who manages my account making a gain in the good times, but suffering no losses in the bad times.
@hartleybrody
I really really love practical advice. And so you are in luck, because I have a practical "betting on myself" story.
When I moved to Bend, Oregon it was 2005, I was 24, and it was shortly after my brother had passed away. I was pretty emotional and wasn't in a rational state at the time.
So when friends, family, every-freakin-person was saying the following mantra.
"Buy now or be priced out forever"
And with this chant ringing in my ears, I went to a mortgage broker. This broker proceeded to approve me for up to 415k dollar loan, in Central Oregon, with my wage of 45k annually. (If you have been following the mortgage crisis this isn't the worst atrocity)
And sitting there with my young wife, wanting something solid to cling to, a small mechanism clicked in my brain, despite the emotion. It didn't feel right. So we walked away. I said to my wife
"I'll perform some research and we'll come back."
And so what did I do? I did what any solid nerd would do and went out to gather data. How? I learned all about scraping (screen scraping, web crawling, etc) from my new buddy Matthew Turland (plug his book not mine, which had not been written at the time but I'd like to think my quesitons helpd him realize his expertise. Yes it's all about me ;-) http://www.phparch.com/books/phparchitects-guide-to-web-scra...)
Using this knowledge I scraped and regexed the county records (http://www.deschutes.org/Assessors-Office/DIAL-Search-Form.a...) and do you know what I learned? I saw that on average the annual increase in real estate prices in Central Oregon hovered around 3%. Yet by the time 2005 rolled around, 50% YoY increases were the norm.
"Whoa" I thought channeling a Matrix style Keanu. "This is Not sustainable"
And so this is the beginning of "betting on myself". By analyzing the data, I knew that this growth was not going to last, so I convinced my wife (bless her for trusting me) that housing was a malinvestment, even though ALL our friends were arguing our stupidity.
It was almost like the biblical story of Noah, where everyone thinks you are crazy for saying a flood is coming. With everyone thinking you are crazy, you eventually just shut up.
Then the RE market stalled. This were slowing down, but no one was putting it together.
Then Lehman Brothers Crashed. And the World was like "WTF Lehman? Alright this sucks but the losses are limited."
Then the market frickin crashed. By March of 2009 it was beyond ugly. http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
And here is where I bet on myself again. I poured half our savings into GOLD.
OMG!
OMG!!
OMG!!!
This really is gambling. But the data and the research I had, helped me see that there was this crazy opportunity. Buying into everyone's fear.
One thing I'd like to point out, is that I consulted with my wife. I told her my thesis and she concluded.
"Well you were right about housing, I'm going to trust you. If we lose the money, we will move on."
The last bit was really important. I only risked what WE were willing to lose.
Ok. Where was I? Oh yeah...
So I buy gold, then I start tracking foreclosures. But I get really bored of tracking them by hand. So I write this sweet bot that scrapes the county records and converts the PDF documents to readable text using tesseract (https://github.com/jfolkins/Deschutes (Finally, last year, I reasoned that it was decent enough time to buy (Rent VS Buy argument and data to support it given our local environment) and cashed out our gold and bought RE.
Soooooooo....
Quite the rant, I realize. But hopefully it articulates the "betting on oneself" philosophy that I've taken.
It may not pan out, I'm ok with that. I like my odds better than the 401k folks.
One thing that sets me apart is that I've learned a crap pile about a ton of different topics I never knew anything about. (Scraping, Economics, etc) and am leveraging what I consider expertise into hopefully long term gains.
Take care -jared
(This is not investment advice. blah blah blah)
All in all I get ~1200 USD of passive income which would be considered an average pay in Poland. I've got a startup on top of that which brings a lot more though.