This wasn’t planned.
But it did happen.
And it is no bad thing at all.
So I’m going to tell you about it.
Well, at least a little. For now.
I always had planned to create
lots of little projects that once
the first version was finished
would generate a little side income
without me needing to do anything more.
This does not mean the
I would abandon them
right after starting,
but that they should be in a shape that
I could abandon them
and they would keep going.
I didn’t have any specific plans,
but I had the firm belief
that I would do it.
Like everything
that you really believe in
the universe came to help me.
****Last week my smartphone
really annoyed me.
It just wouldn’t do
what it was supposed to do.
So I started looking through
the **android market
** to find an **app
** that would solve my problem.
I was ready
to spend serious cash on that,
but I didn’t find
any application
that did what I wanted.
Being an software engineer
for as long as I can remember
there was only one way out:
Just write it myself.
****4 hours (and a lot of google-ing) later
I had the first protoype.
And it did exactly what I wanted.
Most of the code was just
copied together from various
(freely available) tutorials;
And it really didn’t look good,
but it did what I wanted.
****I could have stopped right there,
since I had solved my problem,
but when you stumble over a problem
that has no solution readily available:
Stop. Think. Evaluate.
There are over 35 million android device users.
If only 1 out of 1000
had the same problem I had.
And only 1 out of 1000 of these
would be willing to pay $1
for the solution,
That would still be around $350.
Not bad for 4 hours of work,
that I had done anyway.
I spent last weekend polishing the app
and will spend the next weekend finishing it.
So I invested about 20 hours in total.
And $120 (after tax and google’s cut)
results in only $6 per hour, but
- I did the work anyway.
- I learned a lot.
- It might sell more (a lot more).
We will see how this works out
and I won’t tell you what the app is named
or what it does.
I want to avoid influencing the sales!
But I will keep you updated on what is happening.
I hope it will also help to highlight how some of the techniques,
that I want to explain here, can be used in the real world.