Ming’s Wisdom

I’ve been working with Johnny on a huge re-make of our website. Recall ticketwatchr.com that we announced almost two months ago, well we’ve redesigned it completely and even changed the name. Check out http://www.slickseats.com/, the next step of the evolution of the project. It’s solely focused on the buyer’s experience purchasing tickets to sports, concerts, and theater.

This has been a huge learning experience in creating a website in an effective fashion, as over the past few months we’ve come from having almost no experience in this area, to being able to complete the SlickSeats projects in a couple of weeks. Hopefully more great projects will come out soon , but for now, check out the website, give us your feedback, and keep us in mind if you need to buy tickets to something!

A little snapshot of us in action!

It amazed me when I opened up this site and looked at my last article, it was a whole month ago! Life has definitely changed in the past couple months now that I look back on it. My decision to leave the corporate world and enter a world of new possibilities almost 3 months ago was definitely the right choice to make. Looking back, these are the things that have changed:

1. There is no longer anyone to tell me what to do. The only things that determine what I do now are what makes sense to me and what inspires me.
2. Work becomes fun. I’ve had moments where I just didn’t want to leave the work I was doing that day, and didn’t want to go to sleep because I wanted to keep working, and jump up at 8am to do work before breakfast.
3. Life becomes a fast-paced craziness. Starting the moment I wake up, ending around 1am, every day is extreme productivity. Not the kind of productivity where you simply get stuff done. It’s the kind of productivity where you make decisions that will affect you for the next two years, on top of getting stuff done. This comes with a side-effect of forgetting what day of the week it is, and sometimes what month it is.
4. I see a future. It feels like the past 4 years of working for others can be summarized as this: neglecting my own development. Moving up in the corporation really doesn’t count as developing your own abilities, it’s just doing more to develop a group of people that has already taken the time to develop themselves. Unlike earning a salary, everything done now to create income sources builds up, where every action taken multiplies your previous effectiveness by some multiplier.

So it’s really crazy how in the past whole month I have not had 20 minutes to update this site. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Well I’ve taken a lot of time working with Johnny to improve our ticket-selling automation code, with good results. We’ve sold some tickets already through the new code (e.g. with less manual work), and we’re super excited.

There’s something else up my sleeve though, done in a slightly larger team, that’s going to be exciting for a lot of you. It’s still in the works, so stay tuned for our release announcement in the near future =).

Today we’re launching the Beta of TicketWatchr.com, our first project since I’ve quit Apple. It’s an online store where you can search for and buy event tickets (sporting events, concerts, theater, etc). We have a feature called Watch It that we think is pretty intriguing, so that you can keep track of ticket prices on our site, so that if you think a ticket’s current price is too high, you can keep a watch on it to get notifications if that price drops.

Johnny and I have been working hard on this site for a while now, so we’d love for you all to check it out, and tell us what you want and what you think can be improved. And since the site is fully functional, if you need some tickets, you can use it to buy the tickets to your local concert or game. =)

It’s been around 2 months now since I’ve started this site (technically 8 months, with the first 6 months having no time to write in it), and it’s been a pretty good success for being 2 months old, at least to the standards of what I was expecting. I wanted to let everyone see the current state of my site.

Money spent:

• 19.90 domain
• 22.90 hosting

Money earned:

• 0.00

Unfortunately Google hasn’t seemed smart enough to find interesting enough ads to captivate my lovely readers.

But here’s some more encouraging news:

You can see here that in the two months that I started actively writing for the site, the number of page visits has increased to 55 in July, and 124 in August. Since I don’t have data for January through June, an accurate depiction is to just imagine a flat line at zero from January all the way to June, since there was no content on the site yet. I think this is a pretty good growth, especially considering August isn’t even over yet, and already has double the visits of July.

Another achievement I’m pretty proud of is getting bots to crawl the site. Google crawled the site once in May, and it would be another two months before it crawled again in early July. Now, with multiple pages available and updated content every so often, Google comes several times a day, and I also get other sites like AskJeeves, Yahoo, and some blog search bots. It definitely feels like a sense of accomplishment.

To view the site from a different perspective, here’s a map of the world, color-coded for visitors (only readers, bots are not included) to this site:

To my pleasant surprise, I’ve gotten visitors from several countries. The bulk is still in the U.S, but there’s one from Canada, China, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Netherlands. That’s very cool. In the U.S, I’ve gotten visits from Florida, Michigan, Georgia, and California. Now drilling down into more detail about the biggest cluster of readers:

There’s 7 visits from San Jose, 7 from Sunnyvale, 8 from Berkeley, 6 from Emeryville, 1 from San Francisco, etc, around the ratio I expected. However, the big surprise here is the big orange dot down south. Orange County apparently is the one largest concentration of readers of this site to date, and they come back repeatedly and stay for enough time to read a few articles. And the interesting thing is, I don’t know of anyone that knows about this site who is currently in Southern California, so I’m very intrigued who the mystery reader(s) are =).

How are you supposed to thrive without a job? That’s the question I set out to answer exactly one week ago.

I had everything, an exciting job at Apple working on iPhones and iPods that have yet to be released, business travel that took me to 5-star hotels in China having my own private bathroom made of glass, and a nice, reliable paycheck. It was the stereotype of the ideal job, but I wasn’t satisfied. Each hour that passed by trying to make sure Apple’s next product was a hit, I felt that the earth was getting a little warmer, the poor were getting a little poorer, and the injustices in this world established themselves even deeper than before. Where was I while all this happened and passed me by, and how am I contributing to resolving global issues when I was simply putting electronics (albeit very well-designed electronics) into (fairly well-to-do) people’s hands? Sure, some of you might say (and have said to me) that the iPhone revolutionizes the way we communicate with each other and use information. But will it reduce segregation of the poor and rich, or teach kids the fundamental values of the greater good? Sorry, but I think improving the world through adding one more way for the rich to chat with their friends, that’s stretching the definition of philanthropy. Okay okay, to be fully honest, I also thought a lot about the hierarchy of corporations, and how the top of the pyramid was deeply established to keep its supports exactly that: supports. After all, what are the chances of me being able to take the place of Steve Jobs, by climbing the ladder? Heck, what are the chances of ANY of the Senior VPs getting to take the place of Steve Jobs?

Exactly one week ago, was my last day at Apple. What will I do afterwards? Eric insisted that I blog about this experience, so here it is =).

Here’s my plan: I will approach this in a three-pronged attack.

1. First, I need to simplify my life. The working life is complicated; working and commuting add lot of of thoughts and tasks to your daily routine. You make more, you spend more, and have more credit cards and belongings to keep track of. I’m going to be selling or recycling things that I don’t have a use for, and organizing the rest. My end goal is to have my life almost self-sustaining in terms of upkeep (banking, papers, taxes etc). I actually plan on writing a few more articles how simplifying can improve your life.
2. Second, I want to improve my habits. Lots of exercise, eating well, improving my eyesight, spending more time with loved ones. Pollute less, recycle more. Think more and learn more. It makes you feel good and want to be more efficient.
3. Lastly, I’m doing several projects to try my hand at making money. I will definitely make use of my programming skills since not everyone can be a good coder, and that gives me a head start. I also plan on doing some computer science tutoring as a side income. In addition, this blog will definitely be written in often, since it’s my venue to write about things I’m passionate about. All in all, my income will be much less than before at least in the beginning, but this still works because I’m spending my time now to cover the fundamentals in #1 and 2. A simplified life where I always have a clear view of my current state, and good living habits, will make life much less expensive. I believe that the savings accrued from work will last for a good period of time (perhaps six months), and after that the projects should be maturing to generate some income.

There will of course be updates to my situation in the future. Currently who knows what will happen with everything, but as things change I will definitely announce the (good) news .

Okay, I’ll be honest. I’m experimenting with blogging and at the same time want to make a little side income with it. I’m not sure if it’ll work, but any success would be awesome and exciting. To reassure you though, I will be writing only about things that I am absolutely passionate about. I’ve had a lot of (in my opinion) very intriguing insights on life in general, and I really want to share them. I’ve always wanted to write a book with these thoughts someday, so it’ll be both fun and meaningful. And hey, if I can make a little bit of income from it while doing something I’ll enjoy, it’ll be a nice plus.

I was pretty excited about this whole thing, and I even went ahead and wrote a whole long essay welcoming everyone to my blog. It had big adjectives and other flowery decorations in my writing. Well after a couple days I realized, that’s not me. I’m a pretty straight-forward guy, usually very optimistic and happy, and definitely not an English major. I like to speak my mind without beating around the bush, so this blog will be in my true voice. None of that stuff where you hear one thing and then you infer more stuff from it and psycho-analyze the writer to get to their true meaning. And the two of you can stop hiding now, you know who I’m referring to .

I plan to write about things like my thoughts on how to enjoy life more, being more efficient or successful, or other random experiences that I think are a slightly different way of looking at life, maybe even insightful discoveries that most may not have realized before. It’s mostly aimed at young professionals, but will probably be useful to a wide range of people. I really hope that you’ll benefit from this blog and take away something useful from it. Or at the very least be somewhat entertained by “what other wacky ideas Ming has come up with” =). Enjoy!

– Ming