NetworthIQ Blog

You may have noticed the big change on Thusday. We’re happy to announce our official 1.0 release. No more beta. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to work on it anymore, just that we’ve got it to a point where the basics are in there and looking good. Response so far looks good, a few positive feedback messages, and no negative feedback (other than my wife :-)).

As far as what’s changed with this release let’s break it down:

• New design. Much cleaner and appealing (we think anyway), but still much to do with this one.
• Net worth management now features a summary page of all of your entries, with net worth, comments, and management links for viewing, editing and deleting. No more trying to figure out that dump month/year drop down to update a month. Delete is new, but be careful, it actually deletes from the database (we want you to have complete control of your data), so there is no undo and it will delete other user’s comments as well. (we do prompt to make sure you want to do this).
• Profile/entry browsing now easier. It looks strikingly like a blog eh? Instead of really hard to find arrows for browsing a user’s entries, you can now see the recent entry links in the sidebar. The user’s page also displays the last few entries so it’s easy to go through a user’s history.
• Data diffs. We’ve added MOM dollar and % change columns for all of the figures in the balance sheet.

More importantly, this release stabilizes our source control so we can now iterate much more easily, adding new features and improving current ones. First priority now is to get some bugs fixed and look at the slowness in the user listing tables. Then we’ll review all of the great suggestions you guys have given and our road-map to see where to go next.

No, this blog isn’t dead, just in a long slumber. Here I was planning to finally get a new release out on our anniversary, and it slipped right by. What a bummer.

It was last July 15 that we introduced NetworthIQ. It’s been a fast year, full of ups and downs. We’ve learned many lessons about starting and growing a business.

Let’s review some of the highlights:

• The launch exposure, started by Flexo and continued with Hazzard, FMF, and Jim
• New York times article in September
• Business Week article in March
• The growth of the site in the PF Blog world. I love seeing those badges around.
• The conversations taking off on the site. People are starting to take advantage of the diversity of experiences to gain some ideas for their own financial planning. I hope to bring some more structure to this aspect soon.
• Hitting the 4000 user mark a couple weeks ago

and the lows:

• The near death of NetworthIQ (days between sign-ups) before the NY Times article brought it to life. Amazing what a little press can do for ya.
• The struggle over the last few months to make any releases. There’ve fits and starts and we hopefully are finally close to launching the new design and our 1.0 release (no more beta). But the lack of new features in this release is disappointing. I envisioned the site would be much further along feature-wise by now. But, plans change, lives change, day jobs and families take up the bulk of your time (as they should), seeking investors takes a lot of effort, and we are where we are.
• Messing with the trunk in the source control repository (non-techies can ignore this). We broke the cardinal rule of version control when we switched the trunk to get ready for the new release (back in January I think) with nearly a major rewrite of many areas in ASP.NET 2.0, so it then became a nightmare to make changes on the live site and merge them back to the new release.
• The poor performance of our monetization efforts. Adsense, AdBrite, CommissionJunction, ShareBuilder, Amazon. I’ll be honest, we tried a little of everyting and pretty much nothing made very much money. The site pays for itself easily, but I thought we’d do better. I need to go further in my experiments however, and much of this is attributed to lack of content to bring people back more often. These are two areas I’m going to be concentrating on a bit more. Need to get the site to a point where we can implement the rest of the business model (beyond ads).

With all that said, I am excited that we’re into year two and the code-base is rounding into form so that I can start iterating again. I look forward to adding some cool stuff and seeing how we can improve our users’ financial well-being.