Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

April 7th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize.

For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site:

For another thing, as I'll explain, pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers' disappointment.

As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. I'll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.

The "20 Million Members" Paradox

eHarmony claims over 20 million members on their homepage, and their CEO, Greg Waldorf, reiterates that number regularly in interviews¹. If your goal is to find someone special, 20 million people is a lot of options—roughly a quarter of all singles in the U.S. This sounds awesome until you realize that most of these people can’t reply, because only paying customers are allowed to message.

So let's now ask the real question: of these 20 million people eHarmony claims you can flirt with, how many are actually able to flirt back? They closely guard their number of paid subscribers, with good reason. Nonetheless, we are able to deduce their base from known information. We'll give eHarmony the highest subscribership possible.

1. We'll start with their yearly revenue: $250M in 2009 as reported by the industry analysts at Piper Jaffray and CNBC².
2. Since eHarmony charges users by the month, we'll divide that big number by 12 and, rounding up, get $21M.
3. Now all we need to know is how much the average user pays per month. If we divide that into the $21M they make, we know how many subscribers they have. Their rates run this gamut:
   $19.95 per month, for a 12-month subscription
   $29.95 per month, for a 6-month subscription
   $59.95 per month, for 1 month at a time
   
   From those numbers, we can see that they have somewhere between about 350,000 and 1,050,000 subscribers (the lower number supposes everyone is month-to-month, the higher supposes everyone is yearly).
4. What's the exact number? Well, I found this helpful nugget in eHarmony's advertising materials³: The most charitable way to interpret this last sentence is to assume their average account life is 6.5 months.
5. We're almost there. To get eHarmony’s total subscribers, we divide their $21 million in revenue by the average subscription price. Therefore maximizing total subscribers is just a question of minimizing the average monthly fee. First off, let's do them the favor of assuming no one pays month-to-month.
6. Our remaining dilemma can be expressed mathematically like this:
7. After some dickery with a legal pad we discover, in the best case for eHarmony, 1/13 of their users are on the yearly plan, and the rest subscribe 6 months at a time. Thus the minimum average monthly fee is $29.18. They have at most 719,652 subscribers.
8. For the sake of argument, let's round that up to an even 750,000.

So, having given eHarmony the benefit of the doubt at every turn, let's look at where that leaves their site:

Yes, only 1/30th of the "20 million users" they advertise is someone you can actually talk to. That's the paradox: the more they pump up their membership totals to convince you to sign up, the worse they look.

And the ironic thing is that although they basically admit their sites are filled with chaff, pay sites have little interest in telling you who's paying and who isn't. In fact, it's better for them to show you people who haven't paid, even if it means they're wasting your time. We'll show that in the next section.

First I want to show you what 29 to 1, advertised people to real, feels like. Here are some single, attractive OkCupid users.

And here are those same people behind a subscriber wall. That's pay dating in a nutshell.

. . .

Match.com's numbers are just as grim. They're a public company, so we can get their exact subscriber info from the shareholder report they file each quarter. Here's what we have from Q4 2009⁴:

Pay Sites Want You To Message These Dead Profiles

Remember, sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription. There's nothing wrong with profit motive, but the particular way these sites have chosen to make money creates strange incentives for them. Let's look at how the pay sites acquire new subscribers:

As you can see from the flow chart, the only way they don't make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers. It's the worst thing they can do for their business, because there's no potential for new profit growth there. Remember: the average account length is just six months, and people join for big blocks of time at once, so getting a new customer on board is better for them than squeezing another month or two out of a current subscriber. To get sign-ups, they need to pull in new people, and they do this by getting you to message their prospects.

If you're a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site's customer acquisition team. Of course, they don't want to show you too many ghosts, because you'll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn't change the fact that they're relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that's okay, you're working for free. Wait a second…you're paying them.

Now let's look how this skewed incentive affects the dating cycle, especially on sites like Match.com, where it's possible to for users set their own search terms.

The Desperation Feedback Loop

Even more so than in real life, where fluid social situations can allow either gender to take the "lead", men drive interactions in online dating. Our data suggest that men send nearly 4 times as many first messages as women and conduct about twice the match searches. Thus, to examine how the problem of ghost profiles affects the men on pay dating sites is to examine their effect on the whole system.

There are two facts in play:

• When emailing a real profile, a man can expect a reply about 30% of the time. We've conducted extensive research on this, and you can read more about it our other posts. Let's couple this 30% reply rate with the fact that only 1 in every 30 profiles on a pay site is a viable profile. We get:
  3/10 × 1/30 = 1/100
  That is, a man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site. The sites of course don't show you completely random profiles, but as we've seen they have an incentive to show you nonsubscribers. Even if they do heavy filtering and just 2 of 3 profiles they show you are ghosts, you're still looking at a paltry 10% reply rate.

• There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets. The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get. It's not hard to see why this would be so. A rushed, unfocused message is bound to get a worse response than something you spend time on. Here's a plot of 12,000 male users who've sent 10 total messages or more.

The effect of the second fact is to magnify the effect of the first. For a user trying to meet someone under such constraints, a feedback loop develops. Here's what happens to the average guy:

Basically, because the likelihood of reply to each message starts so low, the average man is driven to expand his search to women he's less suited for and to put less thought (and emotional investment) into each message. Therefore, each new batch of messages he sends brings fewer replies. So he expands his criteria, cuts, pastes, and resends.

In no time, the average woman on the same site has been bombarded with impersonal messages from a random cross-section of men. Then:

The Pudding

Finally, in the spirit of "don't take my word for it", here's how eHarmony and Match.com themselves show that their sites don't work.

This is from Match's 2009 presskit:

Okay, Match is double counting to get "12 couples", since a couple that gets married also gets engaged. So we have 6 couples per day getting married on the site, or 4,380 people a year. Let's round up to 5,000, to keep things simple. My first observation is that Match.com made $342,600,000 last year⁵. That's $137,000 in user fees per marriage.

Now here's where the demographics get really ugly for them.

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.

I figured it out like so:

Remember this is the minimum ratio, because from Match's perspective, we've made a lot of very favorable assumptions along the way. And it also doesn't matter that some portion of Match's customer base is overseas, because however you account for that in their subscriber base, you also have to adjust their marriage total accordingly.

. . .

eHarmony seems to do quite a bit better than Match, claiming in their ads to marry off 236 people a day:

Their higher rate shouldn't be too surprising, because eHarmony's entire site philosophy centers around matrimony, and furthermore that's the primary reason people go there. It's explicitly not a place for casual daters.

As they've told us, their member base of 750,000 people turns over every 6.5 months, which means that nearly 1.39 million people go through eHarmony's "doors" each year. eHarmony fails at least 93.8% of the timeFrom the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate. And what of the other 93.8%, the 1,298,475 people who do not get married and then leave the site? Those people paid an average of $190 each for a personality quiz.

In Conclusion

A major selling point for the big for-pay dating sites Match and eHarmony is how many millions of members they have, and they drop massive numbers in their press releases and in talks with reporters. Of course, there's a solid rationale to wanting your dating site to seem gigantic. When people look for love, they want as many options as possible.

However, as I've shown above, the image these sites project is deceiving. So next time you hear Match or eHarmony talking about how huge they are, you should do like I do and think of Goliath—and how he probably bragged all the time about how much he could bench. Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.

. . .

1. Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13cupid.html
2. The Big Business Of Online Dating
   http://www.cnbc.com/id/35370922
3. eHarmony.com's Advertising Splash Page
   http://www.eharmony.com/advertising/singles
4. Match.com's Q4 2009 Report
   http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/871220273x0x349618/6d370897-220b-... MetricsQ42009.pdf. Match.com's 20 million membership claim is here: http://www.consumer-rankings.com/Dating/#table
5. Ibid.
6. Centers For Disease Control
   http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm. Not sure why they care.
7. The U.S. Census "Unmarried and Singles Week"
   http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_...

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How to Fly 35,000 Miles, Visit 4 Continents, 9 Countries, and 15 Cities for $418.

Posted at December 9, 2010

“I have to tell you sir, this is easily the most ridiculous itinerary I’ve ever put together,” said the American Airlines operator the other night as I finalized plans for a worldwide adventure that would make Marco Polo blush.  “Welp, that makes two of us!”  I replied.

And just like that, I had committed myself to almost nine months of international travel.

Yes, that picture above is my actual itinerary.

Beginning this January, I’ll start a epic journey that will take me across four continents, through at least nine countries, and into more than fifteen cities.  I’ll fly on fifteen flights covering a total distance of 35,000 miles.  To put that in perspective, that’s almost 1.5 times the circumference of the globe.  While visiting these locations, I should be able to cross off over a dozen goals from my Epic Quest of Awesome.

Oh, and all of these flights are costing me a grand total of $418.36.

WTF?

Warning: I’m totally going to geek out on travel-hacking with this post, so if you have no interest in learning how to travel the world and visit awesome places for dirt cheap, check back in on Monday.

This post is also quite lengthy at over 2500 words: grab some coffee, get comfortable, and let me show you how deep the rabbit hole of travel hacking goes.

My Itinerary

Although I plan to get to Sydney much sooner should a flight open up (and in turn extend some of my SE Asia stops), here is my rough itinerary for 2011:

• The Rock Boat – Jan 6 – 10
• Los Angeles - Jan 14 – Feb 13
• Syndey, Australia – Feb 15-20
• Auckland, New Zealand – Feb 20 – Mar 20
• Brisbane, Australia – Mar 20 – Apr 9
• Alice Springs, Australia – Apr 9 – 12
• Perth, Australia – Apr 12 – 14
• Singapore, Malaysia – Apr 14 – 16
• Bangkok, Thailand – Apr 16 – May 9
• Hong Kong – May 9 – 12
• Shanghai, China - May 12 – 22
• Tokyo, Japan – May 22 – May 27
• San Francisco – May 26 – Jun 3 (yes I go back in time on the flight home)
• Portland – Jun 3 – 7  (World Domination Summit!)
• Boston/Atlanta – Jun 8 – Jul 30
• Chicago – Jul 30 – Aug 4
• Dublin, Ireland - Aug 5 – Sep 2
• Madrid, Spain – Sep 2 – Oct 10
• Buenos Aires, Argentina? – Oct 15 – Nov 30 (not booked yet, but I still have enough miles to make it happen).

Unreal, right? If I were to pay for this adventure with cash and book individual flights, it would cost almost $6,000 (using the cheapest option for each leg on Expedia.com).  The best part is, the dates of this adventure aren’t set in stone – as long as I don’t change WHERE I’m going, I can change the date and time of each stop without penalty.

Here’s how I got this incredibly flexible itinerary for only $418.

The Beauty of Travel Hacking

After buying travel guru Chris Guillebeau’s Frequent Flyer Master e-book last fall, I became addicted to travel hacking, acquiring TONS of frequent flyer miles for various airlines through an assortment of lucrative credit card deals.  I have excellent credit, generally get the first year fee waived, use the card for EVERYTHING, pay off each card in full, and receive a certain number of miles for spending enough money to receive the bonus.

In the past eleven months alone, I’ve earned without flying:

• 130,000 American Airline miles
• 105,000 British Airways Miles
• 40,000 Starwood Preferred Guest points
• 25,000 American Express points

I use these points to book insane trips around the world…like this one! To answer your first question, I didn’t buy ANYTHING outside of what I would normally purchase to get these bonuses.  For example, to earn 100,000 British Airways points, I had to spend $2,000 in six months – after prepaying my car insurance for the year, and putting all of my other payments (cable, gym, etc.) on the card for a few months I hit the bonus with ease.

For me to complete this particular trip, I had to use a combination of American Airline miles and Starwood Preferred Guest points.  I had already used 32,000 AA points for my trip to Peru last month, so I simply transferred 40,000 Starwood Preferred Guest points into my AA account (complete with a 10,000 point transfer bonus), which gave me the 140,000 points needed to book my trip.

If you’re interested in learning more about frequent flyer credit card programs and last-minute deals, head over to Frugal Travel Guy and check out the different cards listed in the right hand column.  Rick runs THE best frequent flyer website out there, so start checking it daily if you’re looking to take some fun trips for dirt cheap – his site is one of the sites I make sure to visit every morning.

The best deal right now - American Airlines Citi cards: first year fee waived, spend $4,000 within 6 months for 75,000 points. This used to be only $1500 as early as a month ago, but it recently changed.  Sign up for one (or two..or three) of those cards, hit the spending limit (by putting EVERYTHING YOU BUY on the card and paying it off in full), and you’ve just earned 75,000 points without ever stepping foot on an airplane.  If you’re a frugal spender, try doing things like pre-paying your car insurance, buying gift cards, or do a little research and to find out about some of the other methods for hitting spending limits.  My friend Tyler got mighty creative…

You just have to keep an eye out for special deals (which is where Frugal Travel Guy comes in handy). Worried about your credit score? If you carry no credit card debt, pay off your cards in full, and then negotiate for fee-free cards after your first year your score will not be affected negatively.  If you decide to cancel the cards after a year, depending on your credit history it can take a hit of a few points before rebounding.  Do the research; it’s not as terrifying as you’d imagine!

How to Use a OneWorld Award

As of three weeks ago, my plan was to book a one-way flight to Sydney and figure the rest out after that. However, after reading posts from Sean Ogle and Cody McKibben about Thailand, I knew I had to swing through Southeast Asia to check it out.  I calculated that using points to go from Los Angeles to Sydney to New Zealand to Thailand back to Los Angeles would cost me around 110,000 points.

After looking at  these beaches in Thailand, I knew I had to go:

So it was settled – I was going to Thailand.

I then discovered OneWorld Awards and my plans for 2011 exploded.

OneWorld Awards are flights that are based on how many TOTAL miles you fly instead of dealing with individual flights. They also allow you to fly on most of American Airlines’ worldwide partners, and you can make a total of SIXTEEN STOPS.

According to their award chart, for only 120,000 points (10,000 more points than I would have used the other way) I could fly up to a total of 25,000 miles and make 16 stops anywhere along the way.   However, for only an additional 20,000 points, I could fly up to 35,000 total miles instead…

Which got the gears turning in my head.

Because I had 140,000 AA points at my disposal, I decided to tack on a visit to both Dublin and Spain for next fall!  Obviously it was a big decision to add a Europe portion to my trip, but it only cost me an additional 20,000 points, round-trip.  Considering a round-trip flight to anywhere in the states is 25,000 points…I’d say it’s a pretty good deal!

Now, there were some funky rules that I had to work around for my itinerary:

• I can’t stopover in the same city twice, which is why I’m flying out of LA, then back in through San Francisco.  It’s also why I’m flying out of Chicago and back in through Boston when going to Europe.
• I can only have one open gap on the trip, which counts as one of my 16 ‘stops’ but doesn’t factor into the mileage calculation – my open segment is a gap between San Francisco and Chicago.  I’m responsible for getting myself from San Fran to Chicago next summer.
• I can’t change what airlines I fly and where I stop, but I can change the dates and times of ANY of the flights free of charge (as long as there is availability).
• I have to complete the whole trip within 12 months.

I have to give a HUGE shout out to the incredible community over at Flyer Talk.com for helping me put together this trip and answering my questions. That is the place to be if you have any sort of interest in frequent flyer programs, travel hacking, and such.  It can be quite intimidating due to the sheer amount of information on there, but once you get your feet wet it’s easy to navigate and you can pretty much find an answer to ANYTHING.

How to Build Your Award Travel Flight

If you’re interested in seeing how many miles your dream flight would be, check out Great Circle Mapper. Simply plug in your airport codes (which you can find here) and it will tell you how long your flight is!  Here is my crazy itinerary.  I’m not kidding when I say that I spent probably more than 24 total hours in the past three weeks having a blast on this thing creating itineraries, checking mileage, and figuring out where the heck I could go without going over the limit.

Here’s another invaluable tool – OneWorld “Who Flies Where?”. This is where you can find out which OneWorld alliance airlines fly where, so you can put together a legitimate itinerary.

Now, if you have your points in other airlines like Delta or United, they are part of their one worldwide alliances who ALSO offer flights like these…visit their websites, look up their alliances, and start planning.

How I Am Able to Afford 6 Months of Adventure Travel

Next week, I will be moving out of my apartment in Atlanta, and I have no plans to actually RENT a place in the United States until at least 2012. I also be selling my car, and I don’t expect to own a car until 2012 either.  Once I’m not paying rent, car insurance, car payments, or fuel…my financial ties will be minimal (just some student loans and health insurance).  When I don’t have my money promised elsewhere, I can use the rest of my money to live VERY CHEAPLY overseas (hostels, couch surfing, etc.).

Now, I’m incredibly fortunate to be 100% in control of my time and location because I am my own boss. I can operate Nerd Fitness from anywhere with an Internet connection, so I’ll be working the entire time while traveling, connecting with readers, writing about my adventures, creating more  awesome workout videos, and inspiring others to also do stuff that scares the crap out of them.

Because I’m traveling so cheaply, I’ll be able to use the majority of my money to cross off some of the more expensive things on my Epic Quest list.  These are the things I hope to accomplish in 2011:

• Skydive in New Zealand
• Scuba-dive the Great Barrier Reef
• Something Lord of the Rings-related in New Zealand
• Visit Ayers Rock in Australia
• Exercise on the Skybridge of  Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Visit  Angkor Wat in Cambodia
• Visit the Great Wall of China
• Find the Ninja Warrior Course in Japan
• Kiss the Blarney Stone in Ireland
• Party on the island of Ibiza in Spain
• Wear a Tuxedo and gamble in Monte Carlo
• Climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris

Now, a lot of these things are incredibly expensive, so I’ll be using any sort of connections or resources at my disposal to try and accomplish the goals as frugally as possible. If you happen to have ANY connection whatsoever with any of these goals and can help out, I would greatly appreciate it: specifically the NZ skydiving and Great Barrier Reef Scuba diving…those things will probably bankrupt me

Why This Trip Scares Me

Eight months ago, I was sitting at a desk job dreaming about going to Australia “some day.” Last night, I booked a trip that will not only take me halfway around the world, but it will keep me on the road for pretty much nine months.   This scares the crap out of me.

Here’s why:

• I speak English and Spanish,  but I certainly don’t speak any of the languages used in Southeast Asia, China, or Japan. I envision lots of things getting lost in translation.  Looks like it’s time to start reading everything Benny The Irish Polyglot’s ever written.
• I’ll be traveling alone. So much for strength in numbers!
• I’m a picky eater.  Who KNOWS what kinds of situations I’m putting myself into!
• I have a feeling I will get mighty homesick, as I’ve never been out of the country for more than three weeks…which was my trip to Peru a month ago.
• I’m worried that something bad will happen that I can’t get out of. Not that I plan on doing anything illegal (I don’t use drugs and didn’t even start drinking until 3 months after my 21st birthday), but I REALLY don’t want to end up in a Cambodian jail strung up by my toes.

Now, fortunately the same reasons that I scare me also excite me. I don’t speak the languages in Asia, so I’ll have to start learning them.  I also have to become resourceful, rely on my instincts, learn to navigate foreign environments, operate outside my comfort zone, expand my horizons when it comes to food, learn to deal with homesickness, and talk my way out of various situations.  I have this vision in my head of me becoming a real life Jason Bourne (hopefully without the assassination stuff), and this is a fantastic way to find out what I’m made of.

I understand that not everybody can just pack up and leave for nine months, so I know this is the opportunity of a lifetime.  I figure I might as well do this now when I’m 26, no wife, kids, or mortgage, because who knows what will happen a year from now.  I plan on packing Nerd Fitness full of awesome stories, both good and bad, about the whole adventure.  I’m looking forward to working on the road, exercising in unique locations, meeting amazing people, and going on some pretty epic adventures.

If you happen to live in one of these cities, or know a good friend that lives in one of these countries, shoot me an email and maybe we can meet up!

Nerd Fitness T-Shirts Now Available For Order

Nerd Fitness t-shirts are now officially available for order, no pre-order necessary! Oh, and there was an issue with international shipping orders on the first day…so I talked with Decatur Screenprint and decided to say “Screw it.”

All shirts are now $20 with free shipping to ANYWHERE in the world.

Now, once shirts start showing up in the mail, I want pictures from you wearing them doing awesome/ridiculous things.  I hope to feature at least one picture per week of a reader leveling up his/her life.

Pick yours up today, and your face could grace the pages of NerdFitness.com

What’s Your Dream Adventure?

I realize that was quite the long post and didn’t have a lot of “fitness” in there. However, hopefully it showed you what’s possible when you get creative with your travel plans, set your mind on some insane goal, and harness the power of the internet.

If you have a trip of a lifetime that you never thought you can afford, you’d be surprised how cheaply it can be done. You don’t need six months, you don’t need a location independent business (although it CERTAINLY helps), all you need is a few hours of free time, a desired location, and a little bit of hard work.

As you can tell, I’ve absolutely fallen in love with travel hacking – it’s like my new favorite hobby. Eventually I hope to create an ebook of my own dedicated to adventure travel hacking, but in the meantime I’d love to answer any questions you might have on planning your adventure.  If I can’t help you, I can certainly point you in the right direction.

So, what’s on your bucket list?  How can I help you level up your life by crossing things off of it?

-Steve

###

If you enjoyed this article, check out the Rebel Fitness Guide, my step-by-step guide to leveling up your life! Please sign up for free blog updates by joining the Rebel Army Email Newsletter (or subscribe via RSS feed).

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Living Self-Employed Online: The Manual They Forgot to Give You

Written by Glen, this post has 90 Comments

February 1st, 2009, was a very memorable day for me. It was the day I arrived back at my family home in Newcastle, England, to start working for myself full-time. I had just left a job which for the previous two years saw me working with companies like Nissan, Hewlett Packard and Land Rover as their social media manager. My position in the rat race was actually an awesome one, but it was nothing compared to being my own boss.

As some people here don’t care about making their living from the internet, I understand that this post will not be for everybody. However, if you’ve just made the leap to working for yourself, currently run your own business, or you’re looking to make your money online in the future, this article may be just what you need.

13 Lessons from 18 Months of Self-Employment

Over the last 18 months of working for myself, I’ve learned a ton of things on my journey. Not everything piece of advice I took onboard has helped, with many ideas quickly being discarded. From reading dozens of books, speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, and living this life myself for a year and a half, there are a few lessons I would like to share.

Write a Mission Statement (But Keep It Private)

If you go to the website of any large company, you’ll usually find a detailed mission statement which cites the main aim of their business operations. They’re usually long, boring, and ignored. THe type of mission statement I’m talking about here is more of an elevator pitch: A sentence or two about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what you hope to achieve.

This isn’t an elevator pitch you need to tell anyone, or a mission statement you need to share. Instead, the aim of these sentences is to help you stay on track. If someone offers you a partnership in a large project, you simply have to look towards your mission statement to decide whether it’s a good use of your time. If you’ve heard about a new way of doing things, you simply have to look at your mission statement to see if it might be right for you.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Lewis Carroll

Decide what you want your core focus to be, and write it down somewhere. Internalise it. Anytime a situation arises where you’re not sure what to do, look to your statement to help you with the answer.

Focus On Your Glow

Jerry Sternin, who worked for Save the Children, was sent to Vietnam and asked to “make a difference” with the malnutrition issues the country faced. He was just given just six months to fulfil his task. With problems in the water supply, ignorance towards nutrition, and a countrywide dilemma, he had a big job ahead of him.

Instead of looking to fix one thing, like providing clean water to the country – something he didn’t have the time nor resources to do – he decided instead to look at what was working. Why are there healthy children in areas that are full of children who are starving, who have the same finances and living conditions available to them, and what are they doing differently?

Sternin found some common factors between the healthy children in these rural villages, one being that they spread their food intake throughout the day, rather than just having two large meals like the children who were struggling with health issues. Their bodies couldn’t absorb the nutrients from such a lot of food each meal.

The advice Sternin gave to struggling families from his findings was simple, but he certainly made a big difference.

Instead of just looking to your mistakes and hoping to learn from them or tackling a huge project you want to overcome. Why not look at what is working for you in other areas of life or on other projects, and see how you can apply those factors to other endeavours?

You’re far more likely to have great results.

Identify the Most Important Tasks That Will Grow Your Business

When you have all day to work on whatever you want, it’s very easy to get caught up in things which a) aren’t helping you grow and b) not as effective as other tasks. As early in your own business life as possible, define the most important things you can accomplish each day and give them utmost priority.

For me, my most important tasks vary, but generally include things like:

• Writing a blog post
• Researching niches
• Building out current websites
• Marketing current websites

If I spend most of my day doing something other than these things, then I’m not being as effective as I could be with my time. It will be hard to stick to this rigid schedule at first, but the more you put yourself back on track, the more natural it will become to work on the things which help your business the most.

Just Get Started

I was really not in the mood to write this article today, but I knew that I had to get what I want to say out to the world. I had the idea for the post in mind, and I was excited to see the feedback it was going to bring, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my hands to the keyboard. As I usually do when I’m in this situation, I tell myself I’ll just write around 300 words, and then do the rest another day.

What almost always happens is that I’ll get so into the flow of writing after those 300 words, that I keep going until I’ve written thousands. In fact, I’ve just passed the 2,000 word mark in this article (I have shuffled the order of the points, since writing this) on the same day I wasn’t in the mood to get going.

Whenever you have a big task ahead, just tell yourself that you’ll do a little bit and stop. There’s a good chance that the little bit of effort you exerted to get started, will turn into a strong push of energy which helps you get things done. Even if it doesn’t, at least you did something.

Give Yourself Office Hours

It may seem crazy that I’m suggesting you give yourself office working hours after finally being able to work whenever you want. After all, one of the main benefits of this lifestyle is to get to set your own hours. To take the edge of this idea, I’m not suggesting that you have to pick a 9-5 schedule, but you should pick something.

The reason I say this is simply because when you work from home, there is nothing harder than shutting off. While you’re eating, you may just want to check your email quickly. While you’re in the shower, you may have the idea for a blog post and quickly run to your computer to write it down. The times you start neglecting your normal life for your business surprisingly, yet quickly, add up.

If your aim is to just work for a few hours per day, whenever you want, then you can ignore this. If you find yourself working more than a few hours, or even a lot more than a few hours, then restrict the times you allow yourself to work. The time you allocate to a task is usually how long it takes, so working all day won’t necessarily help you get more done.

Only Spend Money on Essential Items

For all of the people who have no problems making money, many of them have problems keeping it. When you start working for yourself, it’s very easy to start thinking you need this and that, in order to really get going. The reality is that you rarely need as much money or material items as you think you do.

When I built PluginID, my blog which I later sold for a five-figure fee, I did so on a laptop that was five years old and had no hard drive. Every single time I booted it up, I would be presented with a completely fresh operating system. That meant I couldn’t install software or save any files. I saved myself $1,500 by finding workarounds for my problems, rather than just purchasing a new laptop straight away.

Before you go buying every item, eBook or software package you think you need, ask yourself whether you can work without them. The money you save early on helps you to grow bigger, and enables you to adopt an ideal mindset which will be invaluable later on in your business life.

Let Others Down, Before Yourself

One thing I love about being my own boss is that I can spend as much time with my friends and family as I wont (provided that they aren’t at work). If someone plans a long-weekend away or wants me to help them out with something during the day, I don’t have to ask anyone for time off to be able to do that.

Something your friends and family might quickly forget though is that you actually have work to do. Just because you work for yourself (or from home), it doesn’t mean that you can neglect the things you’re working on to spend time with people. Sometimes your business must be your priority.

I found it hard to get this point across to people but it’s important that you do. I quickly had to put an end to people arriving at my house just to chill out or expecting me to be able to make any event just because I set my own hours. Be social, but be serious about your aims as well.

Be Open About Your Position

Depending on how you market yourself and make money, this will apply to people in different ways. When I started freelancing at 17, I had a company website and would constantly refer to my “team” and our “enterprise” when I was just a one-man operation. This angle also entered my communications with potential clients, when I would try to write in a professional manner and be as “business like” as possible.

You don’t have to put up a front. You don’t have to pretend you’re behind a huge company. People do business with people. The sooner you realise that, and put yourself into both your work and engagement with customers or clients, the better.

View Anything Public, as Marketing

It used to be that the designers would come up with an idea, the engineers would turn that idea into something physical, and then marketers were set with the task of selling that item. This strategy simply doesn’t work anymore. In the age of not only information overload, but product overload, you need to see that everything you do, in one way or another, is marketing.

When I leave comments on other blogs, that’s marketing. When I write a blog post, I’m marketing. How I respond to emails, is marketing. When I buy ads on other websites and pay for product reviews, that’s also marketing, of course.

Old marketing is still marketing, but now you have to realise that everything else is too. If you don’t recognise this you may be left with a great product that nobody wants, or something that people want, that doesn’t function as it should.

Recognise Your Own Problems

One of the easiest ways to make money is to solve people’s problems. You can see this online in popular products that teaching people how to get rid of anxiety, make money, or even just jump higher so they can slam-dunk. Problems aren’t just a great area to find a market, but they also help you create one.

A software product I’m hoping to launch in the next few weeks, came about by deciding to solve a problem I’ve had for a few years. It has to do with internet marketing, of which there are millions of other people in this space, so I’m sure it’s a problem a lot of other people have as well. Or, simply a better solution to help them do what they’re already doing.

While you’re on your focused path, don’t forget to see if there are hurdles you faced where there wasn’t an ideal way to get over them. You may have just stumbled upon your next big project.

Become a Member of Your Own Market

The best way to learn what people want is to become a member of the market that is likely to want whatever you have to offer. Right now I’m working on software products for internet marketers, because after thousands of interactions and years in the business, these are the people that I understand the most.

Through your involvement in the market where you want to launch something, you’ll learn a lot from your audience. Things like:

• What things they would like in a product
• What they don’t like about other systems / solutions
• How they expect to be treated as a customer
• What makes them buy something

Of course, sometimes you just have to get something out there (ship) and learn these things as you go along. You’ll save yourself a lot of guesswork and marketing strategy alterations though if you get involved in your market, wherever they may be, and find out what makes them tick.

Ship Your Projects

When I worked on Cloud Living, I literally spent two months on the guide in order to get it how I wanted, and out there. With about three weeks worth of work left, I set a launch date for myself, a Monday, which I made sure I would stick to. The guide was finished on Sunday, the day before, after a frantic weekend.

There was one mistake in the guide, which I later fixed, but everything else was perfect. If I had spent a few more days on the eBook, I’m sure I would have spotted the small issue and had everything in order before getting the guide out there, but I was determined to stick to my launch date.

Cloud Living was actually created in response to the hundreds of questions I had received after releasing a 30-page eBook on the same topic, yet with much less detail. I used reader feedback to turn an average product into something I was proud of. If I had never put the freebie out there, even though it wasn’t a “Wow!” product, I would never have completed Cloud Living.

Making sure you ship your projects (just get them out there!) is not about putting in half the effort and releasing something you’re not happy with. It’s getting something to a stage where it’s great, and letting questions and feedback shape the product so it’s both perfect in your eyes, and in those of the end user. Getting a product that is 90% finished out there is better than never producing something with no flaws.

Do Whatever the Hell You Want

This post was with the aim of offering a guideline, rather than something you should follow word for word. The whole point of being your own boss is that you’re in control of how you spend your time, and what you wish to do with it. If you want to try things differently or completely ignore some things I’ve mentioned here, feel free.

Something I noticed recently is that the fun and passion we put into a task can quickly deplete when someone else tells us to do it. Even if we were going to do it anyway, just having someone say “do this” or “have it done by X date” takes away your drive to get things finished.

If you direct your own life, you’ll have a lot more fun on the way, and you’re far more likely to get things done. So, instead of taking this post as rules you must follow, view them as steps you can choose to follow or choose to ignore.

It’s the only way they’ll have any impact on you.

I’ve never had a guest post on my blog before. But I’m thrilled to start with this one. It’s a great story about determination & passion and it’s by Nick Crocker who starts at Boxee today. 

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In a recent post about how to join a startup Bijan Sabet said:

“There are a number of ways to do it but two of our portfolio companies recently told me about people that wanted to work for their companies so badly they offered to work for free for a month.  These folks had the self confidence and belief that after a month the company would fall in love with their determination, talent, personality and contribution.”

I was one of those folks and today I start work with Boxee, NY.  Here’s what I’d recommend to others.

Find A Place You Really Want To Work.

Find somewhere that you’re inspired to work.  Don’t just settle for ‘a startup’, go and find a company that you believe in.  When small companies hire, there’s a huge emphasis on making sure any new additions to the team are a good fit.  You’re going to be working hard for long stretches in close quarters and you want to be able to look over to the desk beside you and like and trust the person you’re working with.  This is much moreso the case at a startup than in bigger companies.  If you really want to work somewhere, you’ll have more energy and enthusiasm and curiosity.  This will make you a better workmate.

Be Clear In Your Pitch.

Ask yourself, ‘if I was running a company and someone came to me looking for a job, what would I want?’  Startups are short on time.  Your pitch to get a job needs to be absolutely clear so that whoever’s agreeing can understand straight away the value you’re offering.  After calling Zach and letting him know my intentions, this was my pitch:

“I am writing to suggest that I join Boxee in its New York office for 2 weeks.  I will cover flights, expenses and accommodation.  You have no obligation to employ me after the two week period.  We can sort everything else out in the coming weeks.”

All they had to do was say ‘OK’.

Don’t worry about a resume, just build something.

Every decent startup gets a flood of resumes every week.  I was lucky, in that my resume was the We Are Hunted app on Boxee.  That was the proof of my capabilities.  If you want to work at a startup I’d advise you don’t work too much on your resume and instead work on building something you love or that’s useful to you.  By building something useful, you have tangible proof of what you are capable of doing what value you can bring to an organisation.

Just get in the door.

I offered to work for free and I think it’s the right choice if you really believe in the company.  Startups don’t need extra, unplanned overhead, so expect to go unpaid while you prove your value.  There are downsides to working for free, but I looked at it like this:  Boxee has hundreds of people wanting to work for them and no time to sift through every application they receive.  I knew the only way I could differentiate myself  was by being there, in the room, in conversations and doing things.  I figured that once I was in the door they’d at least have a chance to see me up close.  If it didn’t work out, I’d still be spending two weeks working with a brilliant startup.  There was no downside.

Listen in and find somewhere you can become useful.

Startups are always short on time.  There is always something that isn’t getting done that someone could do. This puts you at a great advantage when you’re trying to find a job at a startup because you can ask questions, sit in on meetings and listen in to people’s conversations until you hear someone say, “I just don’t think I have time for that right now”.  That’s when you come in with the words “I’ll do it.” If you say those words enough times, pretty soon you’ll be indispensable.

Be patient.

In the end, it took a few weeks before I could start.  And then I stuck around working longer than the two weeks we’d planned and then it took another few weeks after that for a job offer to be made and another few months to get started.  You need to be patient in this process.  There’s a thousand other drains on the startup’s time and you need to fit in around them.  For lots of people, especially those who ‘need’ a job, this is not possible.  But the more patient you are, the more likely it is you’ll end up where you want to be.

Just ask for what you want.

It all starts by asking for what you want.  Pick up the phone, connect with someone in the company and explain your intentions without fear of failure.  As Paul Graham says:

“Fear of failure is an extraordinarily powerful force. Usually it prevents people from starting things, but once you publish some definite ambition, it switches directions and starts working in your favor.”

Very good idea... I'll definitely try that when I am ready for the job market again !

I know that many of my blog readers have subscribed my RSS Feed only for my monthly income reports. And as I want to make you happy here is my report from last month. April have ended over two weeks ago and now I am ready to sum everything and provide you my money making details. I hope it will inspire some of you to try your skills in making money from independent web & software development. I know that at all it is not much for most of you but it is still my beginning and I am hardly working to increase my income – I will write about it more at the end of the post.

So my goal was…

As I have been writing previously my first income goal to achieve to be satisfied from leaving my full time job was to make more than $1000.00 monthly. In march I have not passed this amount but I was pretty satisfied as it was a real beginning. I have been working really hard to increase my income. Most time I have spent to increase a long term passive income that is not providing immediate money flow. So as I wanted to pass $1000.00 I have been working on one time money makers as well (for ex. website flipping).

Gimme numbers!

I do not want to make you unsure any more. So here are the numbers. This time list will start from lowest income source and end with the highest.

1. $0.32 – Amazon.com – generated two sales – bigger one have not been shipped until today… So no real income (previously I made at last a few bucks to satisfy my coffee addiction)
2. 22,48 € – Google AdSense – much better than previous month as then all my PPC income was only 14,88 €
3. $25.00 – KnownHost Affiliate Commission – for referring one of my readers, most probably from this little link on the very bottom of my right sidebar (Hosted with KnownHost). I really recommend this host as personally I am very satisfied!
4. $390.00 – Website Flipping. I have sold two of my websites that were build in purpose of flipping it later. First that was a really nice blog and I was unsure about selling it until the last day – “Got Music Talent” – sold for $260.00 and second a web hosting offers comparison blog “Mad Host Reviewer” – sold for $130.00.
5. $501.22 – iStockphoto – still my best source of 100% passive income – no matter if I work on it or not I still generate a nice income.
6. $580.35 – PageRank 4 in two weeks report – Report written in some spare time about my successful way of increasing Google PageRank gave me quite a nice income. I was not sure if I want to spend time for writing it but it looks that my readers really liked it. I have sold 36 copies in super special price $7 and 33 copies in special price $9.95.

It looks that in total I made $1496.89 + 22,48 € ~ $1525.43! I have achieved my income goal and made over 1.5X of it! And I have tripled my previous month income! Unfortunately I still need to pay tax, health insurance, server, flippa and PayPal fees and a few more. But even then I made a much more than $1000.00 of my income goal! A lot of this is thanks to support of all of you – so as usual I would like to say to all of you a big THANK YOU!

What are my plans…?

So what are my future plans…? I will not be too active in website flipping as it takes a lot of time and is a one time income. I will try to work more on my passive income sources. Currently I have just developed my frist free Android application “WP Stats” for reading traffic stats from “WordPress.com Stats” plugin. I have put in it a small ad banner from Ad Mob (just like Ad Sense for mobile devices). Unfortunately in a few days I made only a few cents – but I still believe that it will bring real money after getting more popular. In my long term plan I want to make most income from ads on web pages and in my software plus still generate some money from stock photography… If you want to be updated about my success (or failure…) don’t forget to subscribe to my blog updates =)

Would you be so kind to share?

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I need to make a similar plan and goal each month.. now that I don't have a day job..