When we were halfway through March I was sure the theme of this post was going to be “a lot of effort for no progress.” After 14 days I had earned just $6.44, a rate of just 54 cents a day. I was loosing ground, and self sufficiency seemed to be slipping further and further away. Having sporadic thoughts of throwing in the towel is normal for me, but this time I started telling close friends and family I was thinking of giving up. The next 17 days? $19.50. My per day average over the entire month was 84 cents, and the last two weeks were well above the dollar a day metric. I predict I’ll reach my dollar a day target for the entire month of April.

The feast or famine of starting your own business can really take you for a ride.

This month I developed five new apps:

Time Until. Time Until is a count down app that lets you choose how you want to count down: week days, business hours, only the hours between 2 and 6 pm on Tuesdays. Whatever you want to count, it can count. I designed it after reading a study that couching time in smaller increments (hours vs days, days vs years, etc) can increase productivity. Since I work odd hours, I thought it would help me stay focused and accomplish my monthly goals. Only 207 hours left until my next progress and income report.

Color EyeQ. While working on one of my photography apps I realized I struggle with determining how the hue’s and saturation levels differ between photograph of different subjects. I thought it would be fun to test my ability to see color differences, and make a game out of it. Color EyeQ gives you a report card so you can see how well you did.

Business Scale Up. Business Scale Up is another motivational tool that shows you how adjusting different variables can scale your business. I discovered that I don’t have to scale up my user base as high as I initially thought I did before seeing some real revenue.

Nickname Finder. A simple app that lets you search proper names for nick names, and to find out what proper names a give name could be a nick name for.

Loan Comparator – Lets you put several loans side by side so you can see which one is the right one for you. I like to think of my apps as intuition busting. The Loan Comparator showed me that sometimes the best loan is not necessarily the loan with the lowest interest rate, and that term length plays a big role in determining how much interest you’ll pay over time.

I now have enough data from my adblocking detection script to determine that about 12% of my webtraffic uses a blocker. The vast majority of those adblockers (97%) work the same way; preventing the adsense javascript from downloading. A super simple work around would be to pre-fetch the content of the javascript, and embed it directly into the apps.

Twelve percent of my traffic using an adblock isn’t great, but it’s also not horrible. For now I’m focusing on other things, like growth!

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft