Yesterday I had a bad day, but today is a new day, right? Remember that saying about the optimist and the pessimist? The optimist goes to the window in the morning and says “Good morning God” and the pessimist says “Good God, morning!” Well today I chose to embrace the day!

A couple of posts ago, my lovely wife Kate and I gave ourselves some homework. We were to come back to the table (quite literally, it’s our kitchen table) with ideas for building an online subscription based application. Some of our parameters for deciding what the application would be included:

1. We had to be passionate about the idea. We didn’t want to build a business model purely for profit, we recognized that if we were excited about the idea, we would always be trying to improve it and make it better for the customers. If we did not have happy customers, we would fail
2. We wanted to build something that people liked and was adding to society in some way. We didn’t need to cure cancer, but we really wanted to add value to the world some way.
3. It had to be something that could be started with very little capitol. We just don’t have a lot of extra cash to put into something. However, if it was an idea we loved, we would be willing to borrow money (if we felt *really* confident about the ROI!)
4. There of course had to be some sort of loosely-defined revenue model. It didn’t need to have huge (if any) profits at first, but we needed to be able to see a long time financial benefit for our family, After all, we were doing this to obtain financial freedom.

Each of us had a rather large list of ideas. Some were good, some were downright awful. And talking through the ideas and our individual research helped us decide that we could build an online application that was subscription based (as we originally thought) or one that was advertisement based. Neither of us liked the advertisement model, because it put too much reliance on the companies that provided the advertisement services (i.e. Google AdSense), but we both recognized that it was a decent and very viable method for making money. We even talked about the combination of these options - offering the application with basic functionality for free (ad supported) and offer upgraded functionality for a small monthly fee. We decided to proceed to build whatever the application was and decide on whether it would be subscription based or advertiser supported as we went along, ruling out neither of the options.

So we spent hours and hours going through the lists. Some of the ideas are really good, but require more capitol than we are prepared to put up right now (remember, we are trying to self fund this whole thing, and on a shoe-string budget). Some of the ideas were really good, but were fairly complicated to build (for just the two of us - and again, we were not willing to hire on anybody for any length of time due to the cost).

We separated out the ideas. The bad ideas were placed on a “bad ideas” list. Maybe we could figure out how to make one of those into a good idea some day. The ideas which were good but required more than we were able or willing to offer at this time (i.e. too much time or money) went onto a “good ideas” list. Maybe we’ll have money or time to focus on those in the future. And for the ideas we loved, which also fit into our parameters, we put onto a “winner ” list and agreed to talk those over for the next few days to decide which one we were most passionate about. I’ll most likely discuss the winner in my next post!