Home » Archives for March 2010

Month: March 2010

Taxes, business, and FreeAgent.

I, finally, made my yearly pilgrimage to the accountant to have my taxes done. The previous 3 years taxes were *extremely* easy to do since I only worked one 1 job and had 1 W2 form that needed to be done.  This year was much different, I owned a business, worked for a company based in a foreign country, and spent 8 months working for a company that issued a W2. After  2 hours of sweating the inevitable words “You owe” I came out with a $1500 refund instead. (Thanks to Obama and my $7,000 worth of school expenses).

During the 2 hours I spent in the accountants office when she was asking me for reciepts for expenses I knew I had but  didn’t have the receipt for, things that could have helped out more with the refund. My accountant noticed my level of disorganization as well, she ended up getting an accounting ledger that she had in her own supplies and giving it to me so that next year when tax time comes things will be easier on her. I’m not a ledger kind of person so I began looking for some online accounting app that would take the actual work out of it.

I looked at the normal suspects LessAccounting, FreshBooks, and Mint. They all have similar features but one thing I absolutely hate is their tiered pricing, I am limited to the number of feature x as long as I am on plan x. I don’t want to be limited to x because I don’t want to spend $300 a month to buy plan y. I want all the features available or I don’t want the service. As Matt Gemmell said here: “If you’re an employed adult who objects to paying $10 for a piece of software, you should be utterly ashamed of yourself.” I agree. I don’t mind paying for software, however, I won’t pay $300 a month for my business doing well, that doesn’t fucking compute. So I finally on Twitter found FreeAgent. FreeAgent is a set $20 per month, no worries about the number of invoices I was able to send, no worries about the better I do the more I pay.

FreeAgent is really great accounting software, I have taken college level managerial accounting classes with Quickbooks and this is much nicer. Quickbooks is slow even on a fairly high end machine it is extremely slow…and UGLY. The UI seems to have been done not by UI designers but by accountants who want as many buttons on the screen as possible. FreeAgent is not like that, it is very cleanly designed. As for speed FreeAgent is very fast, provided you have SSL caching turned on in your browser. My only complaint with the speed of FreeAgent is Chrome doesn’t support (as far as I can tell) caching for SSL pages. Switching to FireFox where I already have that turned on made things as fast as they should be.

Using FreeAgent is as easy as can be. I imported my bank account transactions and within an hour I had gone from a handful of receipts for who-knows-what sitting in random piles on my desk and through my files to a full balance sheet and profit and loss statement for Quarter 1. It is indeed worth $20 per month and with their awesome discount scheme http://www.freeagentcentral.com/support/kb/misc/the-freeagent-referral-scheme it can be cheaper, if you have enough friends they’ll even pay you to use it. If you need to keep track of your finances and don’t want to be punished when business picks up, I definitely recommend using FreeAgent!

Building a community, 1 year invested.

Building a community is hard work. There are a lot of steps that have to be taken to attract visitors, draw them in, and retain them. Fortunately, this project came with a community that was already there, just dispersed across 3 or 4 different sites on forums; 1 point for us. The downside is that the hunting/fishing crowd are not really very technical, are used to sites that are visual trash like this one, and are habitual people so they don’t leave the community they are already in if there is not some incentive to move.

One year ago today my company launched our first site, trackmytrophies.com. Of course, the company didn’t actually exist yet and wouldn’t for over a month, we were brand new to the technology stack we were building the site with, neither of us were extremely familiar with design or design tools, and we both had full time jobs working for someone other than ourselves. The site was built on Pinax 0.5.1. There was an early beta of Pinax 0.7 at that point but, for people new to the Django/Pinax world it was completely impossible to deploy, I spent ~17 hours, over 2 days, trying without success to deploy the site. At that point I decided to revert to the stable Pinax 0.5.1  which still took me 8 hours to deploy, but deploy I did.

Over this last year a lot of things have changed: we have become a lot more familiar with the platform we are using, our design skills and tools have increased, and we are working for ourselves…technically (we actually work for WebFaction). We have experimented with different layouts and designs, worked with serving our own ads (OpenX community is shit, don’t use it…), we’ve broken shit, read upgraded Django to an incompatible version, and we’ve even helped patch a minor bug upstream.

Enough of the boring stuff, here are some community stats:

  • 297 registered users
  • 612 uploaded photos
  • 10,000 total visits

…and we are not done yet. We have  a lot of ideas that we are still working on; there is a completely new design coming along with *many*, other backend upgrades that will be transparent for end users.

Here’s to the next year ending stronger than the first!

Business is hard. Part 1.

I am behind on my #P52 by a couple weeks so I am going to be catching up over the next few days.

Self help books and thousands of books on the Internet would have you believe that starting and running a business is easy, that it doesn’t take much, and that you will be better off for it. Web based businesses are touted as the ultimate business venture, you can make large sums of money building Web sites and web services for people, because you’ve a book on PHP and MySQL…what else is there to the web?

That is bullshit.

Starting a business is easy, building value is hard, in the State of Utah you simply go to http://business.utah.gov choose your business name, type, and enter the required information. Once you have completed those steps you pay your fees and get your FEIN from a link on their page and you’re set. You have a running business. Now what the hell are you going to do?

Now you, if you believe the hype, start working on your gold mine, Web sites, right…

Chances are you are still working a day job so that you can pay your bills which limits your time working on your own projects so you need to work extra hard if you want your own business to succeed. If you get a couple entry projects chances are you will realize you didn’t know exactly how some integral piece of the project works. If you are extremely unlucky you are also a student, have a family, or both.

Now the problem of time management rears its ugly head: how are you going to spend every moment of your day? There are not enough hours in the day to do what you need to do. Here’s how you might spend a day:

  • 8 – 10 hours at the job that pays the bills
  • 4 hours for school
  • 1 – 2 hours for homework

That is a total of 13 to 16 hours, now add sleep 11 – 8 hours, you haven’t eaten no time has been factored in for commutes or waiting…and you haven’t spent any time with any one other than the people you were in direct contact with at one of the above places. Of course, you will have days off or days without school so there are brief times when you can catch up on things that you are not getting enough of, like sleep or homework time.

How long can you viably sustain this pace? How many days of straight work before you are just too tired to do anything? What about support? If you *have* customers there is going to be a time when they need help or have questions and, if, you get a client from hell you will spend *a lot* of time dealing with his/her issues.

The time table above also doesn’t add any time for your new business or recreation. What do you cut out to make room for everything? What part of your life suffers? Who do you cut-out?

I still don’t know.