(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

It turns out that, Instagram aside, it’s really hard to rapidly build wealth.  Which is to say: I fell a bit short on my one-month-to-the-one-percent goal.  OK, a lot short.  Approximately $30k short.

Oh, you want actual revenue numbers?  Sure, I can do that.

• Amazon’s KDP: $0.70
• Avantlink: $1.70
• Total: $2.40

One way to look at that is total failure.  Another way to look at it is as a free coffee!

So what happened?  Although part of the problem was distraction from the YC Combinator interview, I think the bigger issue was the tremendous difficulty of developing and selling a significant product within a short time frame.  That wasn’t helped by my somewhat middling efforts in finding solutions to those product and sales problems.  There were many days with wasted hours.

Going forward, I plan to redouble my efforts.  The motivation is not only to save face. It is also an acknowledgement that my money tree has yielded nearly all its fruit. The need for a replacement becomes ever more pressing as time advances.

What will it be?  Will it be Snaposit? Will it be the revival of Blurity? Maybe something funny like this guy?

Not sure yet, but whatever I end up doing, you can be pretty certain that I’ll pimp it here.

About half a year ago, I started pondering a question: how were my Facebook friendships changing over time?  Or, to be specific: who was unfriending me?

I decided to start taking monthly snapshots of my Facebook friend list, a task made easy by Facebook’s data-export feature.  I imagine a full history could be obtained using the API, but I haven’t explored that.

Since the first snapshot in December, I’ve added 19 friends and lost 10, for a net gain of 9. Many of those I lost have been mundane: a guy I talked to once during my first year at Stanford, a girl who was trying to get me to be her roommate, and several people whose names I didn’t recognize (yikes).  There were a few surprises, but I won’t out them here.

Change in Facebook friends over time

Other than the jump from December to January, when I moved to Colorado, my total number of friends has been pretty stable.  I seem to lose about 0.6% of my friends per month, but I’ve been gaining new friends at about the same rate.

This brings to mind several questions:

• If I were to stop adding Facebook friends, what would my friend count eventually settle at?
• How has my true friend count (as opposed to my Facebook “friend” count) been changing over time?
• What distributions best model the addition and subtraction of Facebook friends?
• How many of my remaining Facebook friends would I care about unfriending?

To try and address that final point, I went through and classified all of my 346 Facebook friends into two groups: people who would hurt my feelings if they unfriended me, and people who would not hurt my feelings.  Turns out that 140 of them fall into the “oh well” category, which leaves about 200 people that I’d really care about losing.

Interestingly, that’s very similar to Dunbar’s number.  Perhaps that’s the natural lower bound on Facebook friend decay.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

You might be wondering what happened to my one-month-to-the-1% project that I first mentioned three weeks ago.  Been pretty quiet since then, right?

Well, the reason wasn’t that I had given up.  Rather, Tyler and I found out that we had been invited to interview with Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.  For those unfamiliar with YC, it’s basically the Harvard of the startup incubator world (even though it’s arguably not an incubator).  Companies like Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb have all come out of it.

Like Harvard, YC is highly selective.  Exact numbers are not published, but consensus seems to be that less than 3% of applicants are accepted.  For comparison, this year Harvard took 5.9% of its undergraduate applicants.

Thus, Tyler and I were thrilled to have our venture make the first cut: YC would fly us to California to interview, meaning we had beat out enough people to have about a 20% chance of making it in.

Frame grab from our YC application video

Everything else took a back seat to preparing for the interview.  I rationalized this because the expected value of getting funded was significantly higher than my goal.

Late last week, we had our interview in Mountain View, CA.  It was a good experience, but unfortunately, we did not get accepted.

Tyler and I remain convinced that we’ve identified a great market opportunity, and we have the technical skills to craft a product to address it, so we will be pushing forward anyway.

As for my other project?  Well, the month isn’t over yet: I turn 30 one week from today.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

I was both inspired and dismayed by today’s news that online photo-sharing/photo-filtering company Instagram had been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion.

I was inspired because it was evidence that times are good in the high-tech startup world.  Companies are being built, money is being made, stories are being formed.  A team of about a dozen people went from zero to $1 billion in just over 24 months.

I was dismayed because of the message it sends to young entrepreneurs: “Don’t focus on actual problems, and certainly don’t take big risks to make the world a better place.  You’ll be rewarded handsomely if you just make silly photo-sharing apps.”

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Project status: no progress today.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

Services like consulting are great ways to get cash, but their huge drawback is that they produce income only while you’re on the clock.  I’d love to have a product that sells itself even while I’m asleep or out of town, like I was today for Easter.

Fortunately, I have at least three such initiatives in progress for my $30k goal:

• Affiliate links on StoppingInEveryState.com
• Stock photos on iStockPhoto.com
• An ebook on Amazon

One of them, the ebook, managed to move the needle off of zero yesterday!  Specifically, it now stands at — brace yourself —  $0.70.  Amazing, right?

The ebook was produced only as an experiment to see what it would take to produce an ebook.  It’s simply a reformatting of content from one of my blogs, and it’s not the still-being-written version of my hockey trip.  As such, I haven’t promoted the ebook at all, lest it become confused with a proper book-writing effort.

A variant of this photo has been my most popular stock image to date

My inclusion of the ebook exposes one of my interpretations about the one-month challenge: I can use product that I’ve already put in place or put forth effort developing.  I need not start precisely from scratch.  Don’t worry about that making the challenge too easy, since the total revenue from all three of the aforementioned income sources has been less than $100 — not per month, but in total.

Clearly, there is room for progress.

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Status: $0.70 (0.0023% to the goal)