Forgot our anniversary (in the doghouse now)
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.