J.C.’s Money Blog

Yesterday was the first day back from vacation, and I’m really looking forward to quitting my job now. It looks like I have lots of travel scheduled in the coming weeks, so my job is going to eat into my free time as well. I will enjoy being out of the office though. I guess its time to start planning out my leap into euntrepeneurship (note to self, first step learn how to spell that). I have three ideas I am planning to implement:

1. Targeted sports website.
2. Finance website.
3. This blog.

Targeted sports website

I noticed a while back that there is a fairly popular sports website that seems to have a solid revenue base, but the actual design is terrible. Now I noticed the site is up for sale, which could be great or could be bad. If someone buys it they may run it into the ground, or they may fix it up. I need to think about whether it makes sense to try to enter this very limited market.

I have had this idea for about two years and started implementing it. However, I decided not to pursue it further, because it was too time consuming. I had just started my new corporate job (which I honestly thought was my dream job at the time), and I wanted to stay focused on it. I had only the basis functionality implemented and was experimenting with some advertising, when I tried to market it a bit through friends and commenting on other sites. The trouble of trying to keep the data maintained was too much, since I hadn’t built the backbone systems. This meant lots of tedious manual database entry work. I need to layout a better launch plan this time to make sure I launch my product with the basic functions in place and with my backbone systems in place.

Finance website

The finance website is my grand slam idea. I have had this idea for about one year now, but it would be a massive undertaking. I definitely need to quit my job and work on this full time to make it happen.

The idea would be a lot more development work than the sports website, but the audience would be much broader, and I suspect that the ads for financial website are more lucrative than average.

Also, this fits more into my long term goal of mixing in more financial aspects into my “job”. I want to become a more savvy investor, and I believe this means I need to keep a constant eye on the financial markets to scoop up investment opportunities.

This blog

I plan on embarking on something that I love to read about, people quitting their jobs and starting their own business. Also, personal finance is a topic that I find quite interesting and love to talk about money and how people handle the money they have.

No boss. I won’t have a boss now for the first time. At my current position at my company, I don’t really have one boss, but several people sort of in charge of me. Really I have about 10 different people with different expectations of me, which makes it hard to prioritise what to do with my time. I think I waste a lot of time, just pondering what to do next, just because its hard to prioritise the different problems coming from all directions.

This blog can serve as a virtual boss, who keeps track of my progress and helps prioritise the various things that need to be done for my different ventures. Taking the time to write down what needs to be done, creating priorities, and then concrete goals will hopefully lead to higher net productivity. I have a tendency to get distracted by new ideas, so I need some system to keep me focused on the important details.

This blog will probably take quite a bit of time, so I would like to monetize it as the third revenue stream to help keep me afloat.

That gives me three diverse pillars to work with. Pillar 1 is an idea that can be implemented in about 2 months of full time work I believe. I imagine an income of about $50,000 / year can be generated from the site, with maintenance work requiring about 10 hours per week.

Pillar 2 is my grand slam idea. I imagine an income of $250,000 / year is possible with this site, but it would require 60 hours a week and 8 months of development time.

Pillar 3 is more self-serving. It requires probably about a week of set-up time, and 10 hours per week of maintenance time. I Imagine an income of $10,000 / year can be generated by this blog.