Or perhaps, more accurately the title of this post should be “Six Months Out”. I left Google six months ago this past Sunday. At the time I was focusing on the move. I didn’t start working on my business until June, and didn’t launch my first new app since becoming an entrepreneur until July. Since I don’t know the exact date I started working on my business, I’ll have to use my departure date from Google as a mile marker.

In the past six months I’ve launched five Apps:

• Baby Name Uniqueness Analyzer
• Unique Baby Name Generator
• Photo Analyzer and Comparator
• Difficult & Extraneous Word Finder
• Passive Voice Detector (Now with More Zombies!)

The last three were launched silently.

I tried the new apps to the relevant old ones to increase their visibility. I have a link to the Difficult & Extraneous Word Finder & Passive Voice Detector from the Reading Ease Analyzer, and a link to the two baby name apps from the Labor Predictor. About 7.1% of my web traffic fallowed the links. I also had a 2% increase in traffic from people just visiting those new apps, which means they’re slowly being adopted, the baby name apps being the most popular.

One of my big lesson learns is to make it absolutely crystal clear what the app actually does. Despite having 42 visitors in the past month, not a single person has up loaded a file to the Photo Analyzer. Not a single one. I am thinking about setting up a tutorial for it. I applied this lesson to the Passive Voice Detector by giving it a sample text.

Sadly the incredible increase revenue from my ad placement fix did not last. Since then revenue has settled around a 77% increase, from 36 cents a day to 64 cents a day. My guess is the giant increase was part of a newness effect, where users are attracted to and interact with new things. The ad placement is no longer new, and no longer as captivating to users.

I’m happy with the progressive I’ve made. I went from taking a week to write the Name Uniqueness Analyzer to less than a day to write the Passive Voice Detector. On the other hand, in six months I’ve only created five apps, and had a 77% revenue increase. I need a revenue increase of about 215 times (the equivalent of ten 77% increase) to justify continuing to work for myself long term.

Time to get back to work.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft