Social Experiment

On the off chance that deals2buy might have something interesting, i hit jackpot!! A .com domain for only 99cents!! usually, depending on the registrant, anything between $7 to $10.

So yeah, i went and got myself one. Will have to start keeping track of all these domians :D AND make some money off them as well :D

This time its for a little experiment. I dont expect to make any money off this one except in donations, and while people do tend to be generous,i'm hoping that they'll be generous enough for me to be able to recover my renewal fees and hosting expense for next year. This year, hosting is free but i dont know about the next.

Oh well, High Risk High Reward :)

Welcome a new domain

A .info domain to my little kitty of domains. Admittedly not a very big kitty, but it still excites me every time i buy a new domain :)

My investment in building this site is only going to be $1.19 and time. I have free hosting from IFTK Hosting (thanks to facebook forums and thank you to IFTK too for re-activating it so quickly after i let it go inactive)and am using Google apps for e-mail. Might use Weebly for the frontpage. Am definitely using Social Media Toolkit

I did want to use Alstrasoft's StartPage software but the price is prohibitive, i dont have SSL with IFTK( cant expect everything on a free account no?) and Alstrasoft doesnt seem to have a free co-branded option.

Quite a lot seems to be getting done for free :D

If you have an Idea

What do you do when you have an idea but

* Dont know if a Market Need exists as such
* Dont know if you'll make any money
* Know implementation will cost you a bit in money and a lot in time

Do you go ahead and implement it anyway?? Or do you just get a move on and look for something that can be more profitable?

Teach India!

http://www.teach.timesofindia.com/

From their website

" Teach India will bring together those who need some hope

and those who have some to spare"

I think by far the most awesome initiative ever undertaken. As part of my course-work in Class 10, I taught tribal children Hindi(those in ICSE will remember we had SUPW that was graded by the school) the joy you feel when at the end of the year they can recognise and write Hindi alphabets, the way they laugh when they read out stuff to you can make the whole thing worthwhile. That was the point i really got hooked into teaching.

All TOI is asking is for something more valuable than your funds--Your time. 2hrs to be precise.

Share some hope :)

Weird Stat

For one of my apps, the facebook Insight tracking throws up the following graph.



What is weird about this graph that it seems to have a uniform rise and fall throughout the week. Rising at the beginning of the week and dropping over the weekend. Since all my app users are office-going people makes me wonder if they only access the app once they reach office and forget about it once they reach home.

Isn't FB blocked in office??

:D

Approved on Facebook

My second app is Approved on FB :) This incidentally is my first app to get approved. (My first app has the required number of users, I just never got around to getting it approved. Will do it sometime later. Its not that pressing since there are no active users and I dont expect any till about next year.)

Not bad for someone who can hates coding and so can barely code. I've managed to rack up 57users and 9Active users and my first "About Page" fan who I dont know directly or indirectly.

Am hoping i can hold on to my hosting account though :D

Money also does flow in!!

Between the 13th and 21st, I've had 7orders(technically 9 but 2 are distant shipping so they have to pay twice) and i made 1 refund because the customer didn't respond to repeated mails. Actually, the mails kept bouncing so I preferred to do the refund.

Good feeling though to have so many orders coming in even though suddenly, it looks like i'm not going to be able to meet them all in time. I've placed the order for things i need to fulfill the order but I dont know when I'm going to get them. And that is a bit worrying.

Business is up!

Awesome to be able to say that!! With the new season about to swing into full flow, i'm suddenly making quite a few sales. 3 are done and 3 more are expected! All in a span of 4days!!

Compared to last year where i did 2 in 6months if not longer. And plenty of international orders too! Let's just hope I can make some profit on the international orders. I did try and work out a tie-up with another company but haven't heard from them since.

Fingers crossed!

Do you know what you want?

Struggling with the vast amounts of data in a particular area, i chanced upon the idea of using a CMS to aggregate it in a useful way. However, deciding on what I want to offer my end user and whether it will be really useful to them is something I am still trying to figure out.

In other words, I haven't written down what i want. I only have an idea in my head and i'm already out trying to implement it, exploring options on how to make it better and derive some benefit as well as invite users. Cue Deja-vu.

Really gotta work on this impulse of rushing into things before figuring out what i really want to do.

Research Wisely

before you spend money. I spent $50 on code which i don't use. In fact, i researched enough to use code i found for free and use it without any trouble.

What a waste! That's money i could have used for so many other things. The worse part is that i haven't even made a Re off the app that i needed the code for. So what was the point in spending that money then?

Will somebody please take away my credit card??

Ideas, IDeas, idEas!!

For some strange reason, today is a day i am overflowing with ideas to try out and implement. Are they useful? I would like to think so. Are they easy to implement? Heck No! Involves way too much coding for my liking

So what exactly am i doing coming up with these ideas? And why?

Will I ever implement them? I most certainly hope so.

A new domain!

Can't believe i didnt give this a whole post. I mentioned hosting but I never mentioned that i also registered a whole new domain!! That my dear solitary reader, is a big BIGGIE!!

So go on, cheer for me!! I'm certainly enjoying having a new e-mail id :D

Lots of Updates

Its been a while since i last made my post. In that time, i've learned to navigate around Joyent, though i dont think i'm making the most of their offerings. I've partially finished coding(Ha! can you believe it?? I'm coding!!) my study app and it's even gone live. Lots of code to learn here, a lot of it was new(FBML,PHP and MYSQL) but i like to think i've coped well.

Now, while not a lot of the people who've added it have utilised it, i guess i just have to show more patience. Its been only 3days ( I launched on Friday, today is Monday) and i've spent a while today marketing it to people so hopefully the numbers should go up. This btw, is Idea3 that was mentioned below.

I also signed up for and was alloted free hosting on another server. I havent started using that yet but the interface there appears to be more like GoDaddy so i guess it should be easy to use that. That said, took me quite a while to figure out how to work Joyent and i'm really pleased with myself. Especially since its a Solais interface which means i had to SSH/SFTP. That took some getting used to.

I also migrated all my e-mails to Google Apps. Find it very convenient and i love Google apps so it was no-brainer really.

All in all, an extremely useful phase of learning and work.

Damn!/ Joyent!

All the money i spent on hosting now appears to be a waste. I had applied for a Joyent account(which if you dont know is a free account for 1yr for you to server your fb app) but given what i was seeing on the forums, it appeared to be a long wait. So i went ahead and bought a 2month hosting with GoDaddy.


Only to get a Joyent account last night :-|

Should i laugh or should i smile wryly at this???

Some more money flows out

Source Code $50
Hosting $11 (approx)

After plenty of e-mails sent back and forth, in which some things were mentioned as possible but finally not delivered and some things which were promised earlier but still not delivered i'm now the proud(?) owner of code for a quiz, 2months hosting and 1domain name registered for 1year.

I've got some semblance of user base waiting to try it all. Not sure if i'll make any money out of it. Though i'd like to think as a stepping stone to bigger things.

Let's see how it goes :)

It sucks to have no money...

when you have all these great (as always, its my idea so either you accept its great or buzz off!) ideas and no money to make them work. As of now, i have 3 ideas.

Idea 1 has been in limbo for like forever so i dont think it minds too much.
Idea 2 just came into my life. However, people with MBAs are making my life miserable on the amount of background research i should do before launching it(yeah launching this one should be pretty easy though there's a lot of work involved post launch)
Idea 3 is new and Horror of Horros!! It involves coding!! And i've got to do it. Now, those of you'll who follow this blog, know how much i absolutely abhor coding. However, it doesnt seem like i have much choice in this matter. So i'm doing it. And i think this is the one time i just might enjoy myself.

In the meantime, those of you'll interested in investing 30Lakhs in me please do get in touch. :)

Meebo Me-2

I've just added the MeeboMe widget on the 2nd website as well. Now that i'm spending so much time online might as well make the most of it.

I got an order nearly a week ago. Thanks to the location shifting, i havent been able to fulfill it. Will make a partial refund and hopefully fulfill the order by saturday. That way atleast the customer should be happy. Though i'm not sure he's going to appreciate the fact that its taken longer than it should have.

my bad :(