gabrielhauber

Thanks :)

I think before you can answer that question, you need an answer to this question: What's my plan?

Let's see… I don't have to pay any tax at all for the first $18000 pa. Then, only 19c in each dollar up to $37k, and higher rates above that, but nothing as high as working out to be 40% of income...

And... being a family with kids, the government gives us money... I actually get from the government more than I currently pay in taxes.

And... we have (relatively) an excellent public health system. I have no need to buy health insurance, even with a large family.

So... I am glad I'm not trying to do this in the US!!!

Extra taxes if you are self-employed? What, does your government want to discourage small business innovation or something?

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

LOL. I think many people's expectation of what they "need" is actually skewed way high. If I was pulling in a consistent AU$5000 a month from my app business I would be quite content with that (as would my wife!).

Sunshine Coast - about an hour's drive north of Brisbane.

You're in the US, right? I don't need anywhere near 10k a month in order to live, even with a large family and a mortgage, here in Australia.

Good question, one that I did consider at the time. I figured that the normal weekly variation at $4.99 actually made the total a little higher than it would otherwise. i.e. I went with my gut to a certain degree. You may be right about the more users thing at the lower price point giving better growth in the long term. The interesting thing (something I glossed over in the post) was that during the experiment, the total during the week it was at $4.99 was a lot higher than the baseline before the experiment (when it was also at $4.99).

I agree. SongSheet on iOS is consuming all my time right now, but 6 months from now I'm sure I'll be spending time doing other things (porting SongSheet to other platforms or even developing other applications).

Hi zura,

You're right. (Although I can imagine some scenarios in which someone might spend most of their working life in one particular domain, and that's ok). Right now it is taking all my time to build and support this app. I doubt it will be all I will be doing 6 months from now. I have never limited myself long-term to only one platform: I've developed in Java for many years. I've developed applications for Windows. For Symbian. Web apps. And so on. I always like new challenges :) With SongSheet itself I plan on expanding it beyond iOS once I feel comfortable enough with how it is doing on that platform. I don't want to spread myself too thin right now, however - I'm not the best of multitaskers.

Hi bshimmin,

I've been an independent consultant for many years, and it was never lucrative for me. Maybe I just had the wrong network of contacts. I don't know. I only relatively moved into the iOS space and I've had some decent work, but again, it has been sporadic. Hence my desire to be completely independent and not have to rely on finding contracts all the time.

I have some very specific mid-long term goals for my life, and having to constantly find new contracts will not get me there.

There were never months I only made $100. I've only been committed to this path full-time since July 1 this year. The rest of SongSheet's history I did have other work that kept me somewhat busy.

You have to realise that where I live (Sunshine Coast, Qld, Australia) there isn't a lot people wanting apps built, and there aren't a lot of companies around here to work for, either. I chose to live here, though (biggest reason - my parents and my wife's parents are here, so my kids get to know their grandparents), so I have to live with the limited work opportunities.

I appreciate your thoughts, though :)

Hey there. I appreciate your comments. It may very well be that I will end up doing contracting work like that. I had some good contracting work earlier this year that unfortunately went bad, and for whatever reason I wasn't able to find more before the money I had saved ran out. What the blog posts cover (did you read both?) is that I took this path because it was the only one left to me.

I'd love to know where these $1-2k per day iOS contract jobs are that you speak of, though :)

Thanks for that :)