Since my last post in February, a few things have happened. First – BlackBerry launched their Z10 and BB10 OS. So did 2 BB10 apps I made – Tuner and Beats Brainwaves for BB10. Tuner has been doing alright. It was recently a featured Built for BlackBerry app in BlackBerry World and has been listed on the trending list a couple of times now. But it’s only generating about $10 per day. Even after a post on CrackBerry.com, purchases on the app remain pretty low (around $14 for a brief time).  That’s pretty small beans in the gran scheme of things. A part of me is considering upping the price from $0.99 to $1.99 but another part of me is thinking that doing so might have the reverse effect.  I may do some price testing over the course of a week to see.

Beats Brainwaves for BB10 hasn’t been doing that well either – mostly because of a bug in the app for some devices and on some versions of the OS where the app crashes when the device goes to sleep. This has been recently fixed, so I’m hopeful that purchases increase in the coming weeks.  Unfortunately the latest version of BB10 (the one before 10.1) hasn’t been pushed out to Verizon yet (apparently) so some Verizon folks still see the issue.

I have a new BlackBerry 10 app that I’ve been working on for a bit. I’m tentatively calling it Quiet Mind – I originally wanted to get it done in one evening and submit it as part of BlackBerry’s Last Chance Port-A-Thon in February where they were handing out $100 for each app that got approved during the one day event. This didn’t happen but I did manage to submit a couple of other trivial (dare I say ridiculously simple and nearly shameful) apps and, as promised, was paid out $100 each. Unfortunately the scope of Quiet Mind quickly increased substantially and as such has taken not just one evening but over a month to get nearly complete.

In non-BlackBerry app development news, I finally updated WOD Timer for iPhone. This has been on the backburner for quite some time. But I recently saw a tweet suggesting that apps would be pulled from the app store if they didn’t support iOS 5 or retina graphics, so this backburner project quickly shot up to the front of the line. I didn’t have time to do any of the work myself so I turned to oDesk and paid $200 for someone to get it done in a couple of days. Ahh the beauty of outsourcing work. The release of the update hasn’t dramatically affected downloads but I do feel a little better that it’s out there now supporting retina graphics and iOS5. I also had the opportunity to fix a couple of bugs as part of the release.

So since my last post I’ve gotten a couple apps out for BB10, updated an iPhone app that hasn’t been updated in 3 years and I’ve delved a little more into outsourcing work when I just don’t have the time to do it myself. This has made me a little money, cost me some money and I got a free Limited Edition red Z10 and a BlackBerry Dev Alpha C device.

And that is the word.

The first thing that struck me was that bang off the start, Hill talks about the Mastermind… It was only a couple of posts back that I mentioned how this concept has only recently hit me like a ton of bricks. As with Think and Grow Rich, Hill discusses at great length the power of the Mastermind – the power of harmony between minds. His discussion goes a little meta-physical and new age for me, but overall, the discussion is great and certainly inspiring.

I’m only at the third lesson – The Lesson of Confidence, but this part of the book has had a number of great quotes. If it weren’t an audio book that I was listening to, I’d have underlined nearly the whole thing I’m sure.

At one point in this part, Hill suggests the reader should memorize a poem. He implies that he, himself, wasn’t the original author but fails to say who actually wrote the poem. It’s a great poem and when I did a quick Google search, most of the references seem to indicate that Walter D. Wintle wrote it. According to Wikipedia, it’s called “Thinking”, also known as “The Man Who Thinks He Can”, published at least as early as 1905.

Anyway, it’s a great poem and one of the many great parts of the book that I want to catalogue.

If you think you are beaten, you are
If you think you dare not, you don’t,
If you like to win, but you think you can’t
It is almost certain you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost
For out of the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow’s will
It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!

But I digress…  What I wanted to cover in this post is how to save on fitness.  We’ve typically always been gym members for as long back as I can remember.  In fact, I used to spend a large amount on gym memberships having belonged, in the past, to both the “Globo” and Crossfit Gyms simultaneously.  But now with our attempts to cut costs, one thing we’re looking at is saving nearly $100 per month by chucking our gym memberships.

But once we have no gym membership, what are some alternatives?  Fortunately, having also been a personal trainer in the past, I have some answers.

Here are my top 10 FREE, no gym required, DIY workout tips (in no particular order).  Actually, they aren’t all free, – some require a little up front cost and then they become FREE!

1. Go running outside.  Make running fun.  For me, running has always been a chore.  I enjoy it for about 10 minutes and then I just want to be done.  I get bored easily.  Last year I started running a little more outside and began tracking my routes and stats with the Endomondo app for my BlackBerry.  Once I began doing that I found it became more interesting.  Being able to look back at my running and see how I did in comparison to previous runs makes it more of a game.  The app also posted my times to my BBM profile and Facebook and in doing so publicized my progress and I’d get support from friends and family.
2. Get some weights (for cheap).  Several years ago I began looking on Kijiji for cheap weights.  Every so often I’d come across some decent looking weights for $10 to $20 and I’d pick them up.  I received a nice score of great weights one time for $10 and to this day I still use those at home nearly exclusively.  You can also find benches and other gym equipment cheap, but really you only need some weights to get a good workout in.  Heck – you don’t even really need them, though it does make some exercises easier.
3. Install a homemade pullup bar.  Several years ago I posted this article on TheFitBlog.net about how I built a home made pull up bar in my basement.  It was super easy and took only an hour to install.  I’m not even that handy.  For me, pull-ups are a key exercise that I love to do and has gifted me with some great strength conditioning over the years.  It also cost less than $20 to build.
4. Get a skipping rope.  Seriously.  Get something under $5.  This is possibly one of the best cardio exercises I’ve ever done.  And once you’re good with skipping singles, learn how to do proper double-unders.  Check out my article, Tips for Double Unders.  These are when the skipping rope does two revolutions per hop.  I once did over 100 consecutive double unders and then nearly passed out (see Death by Double Unders).  They are fabulous.
5. Learn some routines.  Learn a few routines of exercises that you can do for 20 minutes and get a good (and quick) workout in.  For example, do 10 rounds of the following: 10 burpees, 20 lunges, 20 bell squats (with 25lb weight), 5 pushups, 5 situps.  This kind of sequence is popular in Crossfit and can be adapted to no end.  Get a couple of good routines that you can do a few times per week.  Learn some standards like Tabata squats.  Watch YouTube.  I’m not joking here.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube of great workout routines.
6. Play some sports.  I play tennis a couple of times per week during the warmer seasons, for free at a public court.  I have also participated in pick-up sports leagues in the past.  Meetup.com often has local sports meetups that you can participate in for free.  I’ve gone to a local meetup (via meetup.com) for playing basketball and volleyball – both for free.  This is not only a great way to get some exercise, it’s also pretty fun and a good way to meet people.
7. Set a pushup or situp goal.  This has become somewhat popular in recent years.  Set a goal of say 100 consecutive pushups and every day attempt to do as many as possible, always pushing for one more.  There are apps available for the iPhone and Android (and other platforms) that actually help keep track of this for you.
8. Go for a walk with someone close.  Sounds a little cliche, right?  But Sonya and I have been going for a number of walks with our daughter every week  for the last year and they have actually been incredibly good.  It’s not only a good way to get some exercise in, it’s also a fantastic time for conversation if you can go for a walk with someone else, void of gadgets and distractions.  We will both be in the worst of moods, but half way through a walk, we’ll be deep into a great conversation – sometimes about important things, sometimes not so much, but I always finish a walk feeling good.
9. Read crossfit.com.  Every day crossfit.com posts a new workout – many times that can be adapted so that no equipment is required.  Follow a couple of the crossfit workouts one week and be prepared to get addicted to the approach.
10. Checkout what your community center has to offer.  I know my local community center has a number of free (or very low cost) programs, including some yoga and a fitness bootcamp.  There’s nothing like working out in a group setting.  Feeding off of the intensity of the rest of the class and being motivated by a group exercise trainer.

I’m gonna start this post by suggesting that if you’re reading this because of the post title, you’re probably not going to get what you expected.

My head was spinning yesterday so I went out for a little drive for lunch. My first stop – the Dollar Store, of course. Sonya and I are under a tight budget at the moment so I thought I’d go exploring through the Dollar Store to see what kind of deals I could get on household items, should I need them in the future. This is the one place where deals abound.

The Dollar Store is awesome. In hindsight, I should of hit it up for all the stocking stuffers I bought for Christmas. I would have spent a fraction of what I did. Secondly, if you ever need to host a party, everything you need can be purchased there. Seriously – the Dollar Store is a party hosting dream. Finally – on the way out I noticed that you could purchase gift cards for the Dollar Store. If anyone out there is looking to buy me a stocking stuffer for next year, I want one of these!!

I held off on buying a neat Nerf (like) dart gun for a buck and then headed to Chapters to browse the magazines. I like doing this sometimes. It’s neat to see everything that’s currently going on in the World right in front of you in print. I went straight to the Business section as I typically do. I flipped through Entrepreneur and Fast Company and the like and then I picked up Small Business Opportunities magazine. Holy crap! I think I found my new favorite magazine! I must have spent 20 minutes there just flipping from the back to the front, reading all these little ads that are pushing “Get Rich Quick” schemes. Given my affinity to Internet Marketing and App Development, I’m a sucker for these kinds of things I guess – not that I purchase these programs (much). I just like seeing what other entrepreneurs and marketers are pushing.

So next time you’re at a book store, check out the magazine rack and take a look at the small business magazines – fantastic.

The app is called WOD Timer. I was heavy into Crossfit in 2008 and 2009 and I decided that I’d build an app for the Crossfit community – to help time Crossfit workouts which often involve sets of short (but grueling) exercise intervals spaced with moments of timed rest. Doing this sort of thing on a stopwatch isn’t easy and I thought that having a dedicated app for it would be brilliant. So I built WOD Timer and submitted it to the App Store and it was approved.

The app was initially free. I posted on the main Crossfit message board about it and when I moved it from free to paid, I again posted on the Crossfit message board and I offered promo codes to anyone who responded to my forum thread and asked for one. A lot of people asked for a promo code.

At first I saw quite a few downloads. It was initially averaging well over $300 a month in profit. I made a small update shortly after it was released because of a pretty big bug when the iPhone went to sleep or was auto locked. Other than that one fix, I seriously haven’t touched the app since mid 2010. Yet despite being non-retina, despite seriously showing its age, the app continues to get purchased and downloaded and used! And despite this, I haven’t received any support requests in 2 years.

Here’s a chart showing the my weekly revenue from WOD Tmer.

As you can see, at this point it’s not a lot. Maybe $20 per week on average since October 2012. Still, $20 per week is better than $0 per week and the kicker is that I don’t do anything for this money. I worked on it for maybe 40 hours over the course of a few months and that 40 hours has turned into on average about $200 per month since its release! I estimate that in total, WOD Timer has made me about $6000. $6000 for 40 hours of work is not a bad investment at all. Bonus is that it just keeps coming.

I often think that I should make an update with retina graphics at least. Maybe now even support iPhone 5. This would generate some additional sales for sure and maybe even increase its App Store rating generating even more sales. In fact after writing this last sentence, I’ve made a note to add those two items to my February goal sheet.

In 2012 I read a fair bit from various authors relating to success strategies. Astonishingly, or perhaps not so astonishingly, is that I have not read much about successful individuals who have been successful entirely on their own. Most of the success stories that I’ve read about involve either working with others or modelling the behaviours of others – often both. It’s a key point that I think I have finally absorbed.

Napoleon Hill discusses this at great length in his classic, Think and Grow Rich, where specifically he talks about Mastermind groups which were used at great length by moguls like Henry Ford used to get feedback and bounce ideas off of.

Feedback is a critical component of building something great. When I first read Think and Grow Rich, I didn’t really take in that concept. But in 2012, I heard the of the same concept being used by a number of other successful people online – whether in the domains of Internet Marketing or App Development. And I’ve come across the same concept in different forms in other books – In the most recent book I read, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, I again heard it in a number of stories of successful influence on massive scales.

Leveraging the minds of others is key to success. There is no denying this. Perhaps in rare cases, someone gets lucky, but without other people involved in your business in one form or another, success is unlikely.

And here, my forays into things like App Development is a constant struggle to make it a worthwhile venture. Is it because I take these ventures on my own and seek no external feedback? Maybe. At the very least, getting feedback and working with others – perhaps creating my own Mastermind group isn’t going to hurt.

As soon as I fully absorbed the concept of the benefits of a Mastermind group, I first smacked myself for not fully realizing it earlier (despite the plethora of times that I’ve heard it or read of it or was indeed a part of it). Then after smacking myself, I decided that I would build an online community to create a virtual Mastermind group for App Development. Thus was born, App Money Makers.

App Money Makers is a new community for app developers. The community isn’t meant to delve into coding issues or the technical aspects of app development (though there are forums for this on the site). App Money Makers is for leveraging the experience of others to assist with app ideas, monetization, marketing and learn about the great successes that are occurring in the world of app development.

The community membership is small at the moment. At the time of this writing there are only about half a dozen active members, but I hope that by the end of 2013, there will be substantially more.

For now, the community board is free to register and the first 100 registrations will be given a VIP status. This means that future aspects of the site that may be excluded to VIP members will be accessible to you!

So what are you waiting for!? Sign up to App Money Makers today and take advantage of the amazing benefits of being part of a community of like-minded people.

2012 was a great year – mostly because I got to see my daughter grow a crazy amount during her first year.  Every day was something new with her.  I saw her go from a baby that could barely hold her own head up to a little toddler that learned to explore (and get into trouble).  In fact, the most amazing day for me in 2012 was witnessing her understand something that I said.  She was holding a comb and I said to her, “Hey Cami, comb your hair” and it absolutely blew my wife and I away as we watched her try to do just that.

My passive income endeavours went on hold a little bit through 2012 as I got caught up in the amazement of the life of a not quite yet 1 year old.  I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But I do intend on adding a little more energy to my digital dollar stream in 2013.  This mostly includes projects involving Internet Marketing, digital product development and app development.  I plan on posting more about these adventures a little better in 2013.

In fact, I plan on posting a lot in my blog in 2013.  I look back at my posts over the last two years and I see a glaringly large gap between posts.  I didn’t create a goal list for 2013 (I’ll make another post about this in the coming weeks) but if I did make one, it would definitely have a line item for blogging more in 2013.

Before I sign off for the first day of the year and shut down my computer, I’d like to post this Calvin and Hobbes comic that I saw earlier today.  I’ve read every Calvin and Hobbes out there (seriously) and absolutely love it.  This particular comic captures perfectly how I felt when I woke up this morning.  Indeed, Calvin, it is a magical world.

P.S. Happy New Year!

P.P.S. Managed to get out for a very cold evening run tonight – 4km in just over 25 minutes.  Certainly not my best time ever, but here’s to an improvement by this time next year!!

An old man and his son worked on a small farm, with only one horse to pull the plow. One day, the horse ran away.

“How terrible,” sympathized the neighbors. “What bad luck.”

“Who knows whether it is bad luck or good luck,” the farmer replied.

A week later, the horse returned leading five wild mares into the barn.

“What wonderful luck!” said the neighbors.

“Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?” answered the old man.

The next day, the son fell off one of the horses while trying to tame it and broke his leg.

“How terrible. What bad luck!”

“Bad luck? Good luck?”

The army came to all the farms to take the young men to war. The farmer’s son was spared as his broken leg meant he was of no use to them.

“Good luck? Bad luck?”