Cogitu

Last week, I mentioned I was re-evaluating things. This week, that's even more true due to additional happenings.

Mint & Intuit

When I decided I wanted to try the indie, the main area I planned to focus on was personal finance software. Budgee is already out there, but it could use some improvements and I also have another similar, but different idea that is closer to something like Quicken. I'm passionate about personal finance and I think there are still some opportunities to provide something different in the app store. Mint.com is hugely popular with people right now and with good reason - it's totally free. I know some people have problems with it because it doesn't support their bank and others just don't like having their financial data online (with a third party). Those issues don't seem to be a problem for most people though.

For me, the issue with Mint has always been that they are more focused on reacting instead of being proactive. Yes, you can setup a budget, but budgeting support is fairly limited today. The bigger deal was that the only transactions you saw were ones that were being processed by your bank (or credit card company, etc.) As such, you couldn't use cash at all since you *have* to import transactions directly from a bank. You also couldn't enter a transaction before the bank processed it - so if I use my debit card to grab lunch, I have to wait 1-3 days for that money to show up as spent on Mint. Well, as of last week, Mint.com has been updated to address this issue. Now you can manually enter transactions, track cash accounts, and even split transactions. So why is that a big deal for me? Well, Mint already has an iPhone app and I think it's reasonable to assume it'll be ported to iPad in the not too distant future. I think it's also reasonable to assume the new features will be worked into the app as well.

In and of itself, that's not the end of the world - but now you have the issue of price. If the Mint.com app (or service) had a fee, then things would be better, but as-is, the existing personal finance apps are going to have to compete with a free service (that's relatively full featured). For iPhone apps, I don't think this is *quite* as big a deal since they are already priced extremely competitively, but for iPad, I think it's a different story. I expect quite a few Quicken replacement type apps to jump to iPad over the next few months and I would expect the price range to be $5 - $20 for these apps...with most in the mid-upper end of that range. If Mint.com updates their app to work on iPad and adds in the new features, I'm not sure such pricing will still be possible. The one area where Mint is still weak is budgeting - so that is still one area to focus on.

Moneywell

Here's the thing though - I know Moneywell is coming to iPhone (and I would assume iPad as well). Now Moneywell is a great app on the Mac and I'm sure it'll be a great app when it hits the app store. It's focused on managing your budget as much as your accounts and it uses the envelope system as it's budgeting method of choice. This is something I've been planning on doing as well. So if I continue down this path, I'm going to end up trying to compete with Moneywell directly. What I won't be able to compete with (at least at this point) is that Moneywell will sync with desktop software. I don't know if desktop sync is something people will be as interested in if there is an iPad app, but I can certainly see the interest with using the iPhone/iPod touch as a mobile input/view device for the desktop app. Anyway, the point is that the app I've been thinking about building is not only going to have to differentiate itself from Mint.com, but it'll also have to do the same (and perhaps more so) from Moneywell. On one hand, I like the idea of competing with the big (or bigger at least) guys. On the other hand, it's just me...no designer, no team of developers, no existing banking framework (for data download from banks, etc.) I know I can build out a nice app that I'm happy with and that I think users will enjoy. The question though, is whether or not I can do it fast enough, sell it for a competitive price, and still make a living doing this.

Contracting Gigs

I mentioned it last week, but I've heard of even more local mobile development contract gigs. Some of them sound pretty exciting, so I'm definitely going to check them out. I don't know that I want to start doing contracting fulltime as my long term plan...if I did that, it seems like I'd be getting back into just about everything I don't like working as a regular fulltime employee...so I might as well go back into the .NET world and get a fulltime job again (which I still may do...I just need to find the right company before I'd do that.)

This Week

I'm going to keep pushing forward on the personal finance app because it's something I want to be using. I have it built as a webapp (which I've been using for 6 months or so now) and know what I do and don't want in the finished app. The only question for me is whether I make the real app a web app (as in HTML5 type), build a native iPhone/iPad app, or whether to look into building a Silverlight 4 app (with the main focus being a Windows version). Of course, the downside to a Silverlight app would be that I can't run it on my iPad/iPhone...but the upside is I could build the app much faster and I do believe the Windows world could use an envelope budgeting app (and I'm sure it would fit on a Window Phone 7 device nicely as well...) I'm also going to spend more time this week working the contracting opportunities - right now, I only know what they are at a high level, but I don't know if they are gigs that match up with my skillset nor do I know the planned budgets for them.