lucas03

It coded that website 8 years ago as a master's degree thesis. I am an investor myself, trying to achieve financial independence before retirement, so I kept using the site myself and hopefully will never stop. Stripe is there for the past year, I try to keep costs as low as possible. Only pay for a domain, hosting, and an affiliate program. It's a dividend growth investing tracker - digrin.com

My main core would be real estate and stocks. I find them safe, real estate more than stocks. Though stocks are connected to products that produce value. For retirement maybe DGI might be interesting.

then probably gold, diamonds, etc -> to store value, not to expect huge gains

p2p lending -> can do ~10% annually, but it's risky.

crypto - risky bet, as you are in software, small % might make sense. Choose the coin that makes most sense to you as a software developer

It's been probably 15 years since I started thinking how having a passive income covering living costs would be greatly liberating. I like FIRE movement, and was lucky enough to create a website for tracking dividends as my master thesis at the university. As any website requires time just to keep it running, I always knew I have to create a website that would be useful for me, so I don't lose interest in it and the project doesn't die after few months.

Financial independence is not that hard, it's just simple math on cash flow and how inflation and debt works. I knew dividends will be probably hard to beat long-term with other passive income, so I was pretty confident I would keep building a dividend tracking website for me, even if nobody else would be using it. I thought there must be a better way to track dividends than putting them manually on spreadsheets.

So how much time it took me to reach profitability? Probably a few years. I have not been asking for paid membership before that. I added a paid membership that was equal to free membership about a year ago. I called it supporter, as there were no upsides from paying for it. But some payments did come. And as I had new ideas, I started to bring these ideas to life only for paid memberships. Slowly it grows. I still want to have a usable free membership for the majority of users, but I think I would not be doing it forever for free.

So what I think works well? Find a community for a problem you are solving, so you get a lot of feedback and improve it all the time. Give paid membership to valued members in those communities - moderators, admins, youtubers, ... Be active on those reddits/facebooks, solving their problems and getting the users for your service. As the site grows, you can slowly implement more and more features for paid membership only, until you have a good free/paid ratio (up to you to decide ideal %).

Most importantly I still use it myself, for tracking my own portfolio - https://www.digrin.com/portfolio/24-dividend-growth-investin... and keeping an eye on my estimated financial independence year. I feel much better building a tool for myself and like-minded people, not just profit.

1. dividend growth portfolio

2. p2p lending

3. lifetime affiliate commissions for referrals

4. SaS website with paid membership

What I plan to have in the future:

1. crypto lending

2. real estate

It's a stock portfolio manager focused on dividends.

I have been thinking about financial independence and financial literacy for years. How so many of us were never taught about the impact of credit card loans and inflation on our financial situation. So as I've read more about how a brand new car is the worst thing you can do with your money, I dug deeper into how money can make money. As I started investing right after university, I thought the web would be a better way to track dividends automatically, instead of manual google spreadsheets. So this is my project I work on weekends mostly, trying to visualize dividend stocks and what passive income I can expect. It's always half baked project because there are so many exchanges and stocks that all have their own problems and it's hard to automate from free data sources. I really like building the project I use myself! Hopefully, it will last!