In our quest to obtain Financial Freedom, we have so far identified and refined three different options for us to pursue. They are as follows:

1. creating content pages and generating revenue from advertising on those pages
2. creating an online store to sell custom software that gets delivered to the customer via a download (or ordering a CD)
3. create an online service that is subscription based, providing the functionality that might be provided in an application that a user could have otherwise downloaded

Those three options fit the parameters of our goals fairly well, although I can see that some will fit better than others. So lets start tearing them apart. I find the easiest way to do this is to go with the “pros and cons” list approach. Kate didn’t put up too much of a fight, so we started dissecting the three options.

1) creating content pages and generating revenue from advertising on those pages
Pros:

• a well written article can have a long life and very low maintenance
• lots of great, easy to use advertising methods available these days (i.e. Google AdSense, Chitika, etc)
• content can be created rather quickly (as compared to developing a full blown application)

Cons:

• the reliance of our income on an advertising model can be somewhat risky (i.e. if Google changes their agreement at any time, which they can do, it could change our profit margins dramatically, and rather instantly)

2) creating an online store to sell custom software that gets delivered to the customer through downloading (or ordering a CD)
Pros:

• there are lots of niche markets for which applications could be created
• if we created a decent B2B application (as opposed to a B2C application), and it takes off, the potential of profit in licensing is great

Cons:

• lots of work to design and develop a decent application and make it available for different platforms
• the download model has always been a pain as far as distributing updates (bug fixes)
• continued tech support for the life of the application

3) create an online service that is subscription based, providing the functionality that might be provided in an application that a user could download
Pros:

• the online model is quick and easy to update when adding new features and fixes

Cons:

• lots of work to design and develop a decent online service
• continued tech support for the life of the application

There are some obvious pros and cons to each of these that we didn’t list. It just seemed that they were unimportant to our goals, or they were the same across all three options.

But my lovely wife and I had a date - with no kids tagging along, and we both wanted to drop this talk for a while so we could enjoy our evening!