When my wife and I started on the idea of the iKollect.com website about a year ago, we were going with the “Field of Dreams” approach to running a business. We figured that if we could build an application that people wanted to use, the traffic would start flowing in and all we would have to do would be to monetize the site. Pretty simple, right? So believe it or not, in the past year we never sat down once to plan out exactly how we would monetize the site. But things have changed so monetizing the site has moved to the top of our to-do list.

What Changed?

One year ago we had exactly one user (me). And closing out 2007, we have, well, lots of users. Mind you, it’s not “Google lots” or “iTunes lots”, but considering our niche market of “hobbyist who like to computerize their inventories”, we are doing pretty darn well. Our users seem to really be sticking with us, and they keep on sending us compliments and feature requests.

The other thing that changed was my attitude. After a relaxing holiday break with the family, I went back to the day-job and realized how much I didn’t want to be there. Nagging Boss to deal with. Time sheets to fill out. Worthless meetings to attend. All that usual big-company jazz. Yuck.

You’d think I’d be relaxed and able to deal with all that easier, right? Nope! On my first day back it was just too much and I snapped. So I looked at my list of goals for the year ahead and made a serious change. Right up at the top is now “Hand in resignation for the day-job by end of 2008″. I rolled up my sleeve and wrote that goal on my forearm. It was now official! I had a real goal that I was excited about again…and I had ink all over my arm.

From Baby-Steps to Bigfoot-Steps

After covering my arm with graffiti, I started adding up all the benefits I received from my current employer. Of course there’s the salary, but there’s lots more that they give me that have me in those corporate hand-cuffs. There’s the 401(k) match, the health insurance, the portion of the taxes they pay, the discounted car insurance, etc. etc. etc. I added it all up and went “holy crap! How am I going to go from zero to that off in less than a year?”

After calming down, I decided to break the amount down as a month to month goal, gradually increasing throughout the year. My annual goal was about $100k which is about $8300 per month before taxes or any other deductions of any sort. I made up some other guidelines for the goal which included:

1. No consulting. That’s not much different from my day job.
2. I want to be averaging the minimum of $8.3k/month for 3 months straight before giving my employer proper notice
3. I would give myself the first couple of months to get geared up, so I wouldn’t already feel behind schedule on day one

I wanted to increase the amount gradually, and not make an unreasonable goal that would have me feeling defeated straight away. So I started out gently, increasing by .2% every week for the first month and then gradually moved up from there, settling at an increase of 4% every week until I got to 100% of my goal. It looks like this:

week….% increase….$ goal
03/03………0.2%……..$17
03/10………0.4%……..$33
03/17………0.6%……..$50
03/24………0.8%……..$67
03/31………1.0%……..$75
04/07………2.0%……..$150
04/37………4.0%……..$300
04/10………8.0%……..$667
09/15……..92.0%……..$7666
09/22…….96.0%……..$8000
09/29……100.0%……..$8333

Is that a bit overzealous? Yeah, probably. But that’s my goal and now that I’ve just announced it on this blog, I am committed to making that goal a reality. And that means I need to think about how to turn a profit as my number one priority. What do you think?