Tax Day

Today was tax day. It was a triple-whammy for me. I had to pay:

• personal ’08 State & Federal taxes
• personal (estimated) Q1 ’09 State & Federal taxes
• corporate (estimated) Q1 ’09 State taxes

This was not nearly as much fun as it sounds, even before considering the fact that the whole point of the exercise is to take money from my pocket. Anyway, only slight progress on the marketing project today: I added some more sites to the whitepaper.

Competition

All three of the sites I added today (DJ Ape, Minuplu, and Calcudoku) look like enterprises set up to make money off of puzzles, usually by selling books. All three are multi-puzzle undertakings, i.e. KenKen-style puzzles form only a part of their business.

Naturally, I wonder how things are going for them. My own results have been very poor, but then (a.) I’m new to this, (b.) I don’t have (as perhaps these people do) a pre-existing reputation in the puzzle community, (c.) these puzzles are my only offering, and (d.) I haven’t aggressively marketed to puzzlers yet. Anyway, perhaps I’ll ask for comment from these folks towards the end of the month.

Future Work

I’ve almost run out of things to do before getting around to the much-discussed widgets. I am fooling around with getting mail setup on my VPS, however, which is proving to be a bit of a time suck. I plan to:

• Configure MTA on Slicehost VPS (inside baseball, but a prerequisite for other things)
• Research widgets (create additional SKUs of the puzzles)

Yesterday’s Stats

Up a little over yesterday, still very low. It’s not even interesting to run an Adwords campaign against this traffic, so it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to come up with worthwhile monetization experiments. (Not in terms of generating any real revenues, just in terms of seeing something happen.)

Follow Along

You can subscribe to my RSS feed, if you’d like to follow along with this month’s project, in which I attempt to create and popularize a puzzle site.