Mission Statement
Here’s my mission statement for this experiment (am I mixing metaphors?):
To document my attempts to repeatedly double my $1 Lunar New Year’s Gift in a playful, lighthearted experiment, seeking passive income opportunities, soliciting feedback, creating value, and sharing results with each transaction.
Vision
Here are more detailed bullet points which clarify the above mission statement:
- I want real value to be created with each transaction and avoid a “red paper clip”-type trajectory for this effort. Ideally, the people on the buying end of my transactions will be unaware of this experiment, although I’m going to relax this restriction up to $64 or $128.
- The money I generate will be my own to keep and do as I please with. This is consistent in wanting the transactions to stand on their own merit as far as value is concerned and not have this devolve into some panhandling, gimmicky, or “charitable cause” effort. Ideally, this will be a lesson for some of us (myself included) in entrepreneurship.
- I can put time into this effort (and hopefully recover my consulting time costs later), but want to stick to the gifted dollar being the sole initial source of funds and only being able to acquire new things with the profits.
- I plan to document my efforts here and make this information freely available to the public. I also welcome suggestions on our Facebook Page but reserve the sole discretion to determine how to invest the money.
Implementation
- Ideally, the investment should generate income with minimal effort on my part. If I receive money for someone in exchange for a cookie plus web design, then I’ve really sold hours of my time, not the cookie. To this end, I’m going to document and deduct time spent on this effort from the profits. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll value my time at $100/hour to make this effort potentially reproducible by people who would hire others to do what I do. (Disclaimer: I’m a software developer who knows how to buy domains, create websites, etc. I also use a shared web host so won’t be incurring or imputing any hosting fees for this effort for now.)
- I’m vegan, so am choosing to avoid any investments which are overtly non-vegan (like reselling burgers with real meat, etc.)
- Initially, of course, I can’t deduct ancillary costs, so I’ll just record them for now and deduct them later (if the profits allow it). I also won’t bother with declaring profits to the IRS until I exceed a certain minimum threshold, and I’ll notify you all of this change.
Here are the spreadsheets that you can follow along with: