Despite being a shorter month, Februrary’s numbers are up slightly. I earned $22.34 for a daily average of 77 cents. I’m slowly climbing towards that dollar a day goal. I also had almost 800 additional new users over January, thanks in part to being mentioned in a baby center forum post. (Much thanks for the love!)

This month I had only one new app, the Debt Pile Annihilator. The Debt pile annihilator compares different debt repayment strategies, such as the the snowball strategy of paying off smallest loans first, or the more optimal highest interest rate first.

Instead of focusing on new apps like I initially intended, I focused on site improvements.

There’s always a balance to be struck between writing code quickly, and writing it elegantly. I don’t get paid if I don’t publish the app. Therefore, the first time I write a new app in a new category, I focus more on getting it done quickly. Correctly, but quickly. Once I have more than one app in a given category it’s time to really focus on modularizing the code so I fix only need to fix each bug once. This month that meant both the image/photography apps and the financial apps.

While working on the financial apps I decided to make them more flexible, and allow for additional types of loans and debts, such as interest only loans, deferred interest department store cards, and changing rate loans. That ended up being a bit more time consuming than I initially estimated, partially because I had no idea how truly complex the financial industry can be. That’s one of the things I like about this self-employment journey. I am learning so much.

The other potential big issue I’ve been trying to get a handle of is the use of ad blockers. The numbers are still bouncing around a bit, but right now it looks like about 10% of my web traffic using a blocker, but I had one day as high as 30%. Ten percent is acceptable, 30% is most definitely not. For now I’m simply asking those using adblockers to consider turning them off when visiting my site. Please don’t pick on the little guy! $20/mo is barely enough to cover the costs (domain, hosting, bandwidth) associated with serving these apps to you. The little bits I get from adviews help, even if one never clicks on an ad. While one person’s ad blocker won’t make a difference, taken together it can be a big deal.

It’s been a busy month, but most of the changes have been internal and not noticeable. I do have a couple new apps almost ready to go out. Hopefully march will be the month of many noticeable changes.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft