It's been quite a year...

August 9th, 2009

…since I wrote my last post!

Since then I’ve managed to:

  • get Pennyminder launched,
  • Attended and presented Pennyminder at FinovateStartup09.
  • Launched a Pennyminder companion product called Chipped.In (http://chipped.in/.
  • Launched a site (my business partner’s) called Sharable Things.

From August of last year till March of this year, I was doing a contract with some friends of mine, but I felt that I needed to work on Pennyminder full time (with some time out for some contract work to help pay the bills) and left there to try and make a go of it.

A year on my entrepreneurial path. The results so far are less than spectacular. It is so hard to get traffic for a site these days and contract work seems sparse during the summer. I may have to get a regular job and regroup.

I built pennyminder (and now chipped.in) for myself and extrapolated my needs into a market (that is somewhat validated by the success of Mint.com), but I am now focused on direct validation of my product into the market and I am attempting to use the techniques of the lean startup to do that.

But… most of these rely on actually getting some early adopters and traffic to help you refine the product to fit the actual market. And herein lies my dilemma, I cannot seem to drive any significant traffic to either site nor can I seem to convert the little bit of traffic I am getting into users. Marketing is not my strength. However, I continue to learn and my mistakes are not all that costly.

With this post, I hope to reboot my blog and start posting more often. I intend to write on a number of subjects which should give me some more to write about. I hope to write more on the Pennyminder blog too.

Posted by vince Filed in 0 comments »

A new beginning

August 7th, 2008

Kinzin is no longer my day job. I have taken on some contract work that will allow me more time to work on Pennyminder. I have been steadily pushing Pennyminder forward for the past year into something that provides a simple but complete set of tools for people, both individuals and small groups, to manage their finances and track expenses.

It was the right time for me to leave. I am very close to release and want to spend some more time to push it the final bit to get it done and launched. My current client is very interested in Pennyminder and how it might be of benefit to his site. His project is very interesting and I am having a blast!

I will miss the team at Kinzin very much, they are some of the best people I have ever worked with and that’s saying something as I’ve worked with some great people over the years.

I have work lined up for August and beyond, but I am open to new contract opportunities. If you’re looking for an experienced Rails/Facebook developer, either here in the Vancouver area or telecommuting, then please send me an email.

Posted by vince Filed in