Web Application Development for Personal Development

[Cat Dancer]

An idea popped into my head early this morning, more or less fully formed in some detail. My only hesitation with sharing it now is that it may sound more developed than it really is. But, with that caveat, here it is.

I am a web application developer, and wouldn't it be cool if we had some web applications for personal development? For example, suppose you are in the field of personal development, and you, let's say, had put together a system to help people overcome fear. You might publish this system by writing a book, or putting together an audio CD to sell, or give speeches, or post in a blog, or do audio podcasting, or host a forum on overcoming fear... or, how about a web application?

What would a web application to help people overcome fear look like? Well, I don't know, since I'm not that knowledgeable about personal development. But, just to make something up, suppose your system had a person name courageous things they've done as a way of recognizing their courage. Then the web application could ask them each day to name one courageous thing that they've done that day. And then after a week, or after a month, they could look back and see the 7 or 30 courageous things that they've done.

So (my idea continues) I can develop a web application for someone in the field of personal development, to make it work the way they would want it, and run it on servers so that people can use the application, and in return I'd ask for a 30% cut of the proceeds to pay for the servers and so on. How (and if) you'd want to charge for people to use your application would be up to you. You could have an up-front monthly subscription fee, or let people use the application for free supported by advertising, or even (as long as I'd have enough money from other sources to keep the servers running) to give your application away for free in an "open source" kind of way, if that's what you wanted.

Why 30%? In traditional book publishing you might make around a 10% royalty on a book you wrote, but the overhead of running a web application is a lot less than getting a book into a bookstore, so having your cut be 70% instead of 10% is a lot better. On the other hand I wouldn't want to get into a situation where I was asking for a lower cut and it turned out it wasn't enough to keep the servers running. I'd rather be able to lower my cut later rather than being forced to raise it.

Your system that was being implemented in the web application would remain belonging to you, so if you didn't like my implementation or my server's responsiveness, you could give on me and go with someone else. In turn the platform that I would be developing to support your web application would be available to other people to build their web applications on.

I'd be doing this part time, in between paying work (at least until and if this takes off), so it might take me a while to finish a web application for you. If you have money, you could prepay me for development. This wouldn't change the payout (instead of getting 60% you'd get 100%, until the prepayment was paid off), but it would get the application developed faster.

Wow, well, like I said, this all just popped into my head a couple hours ago, and it took me longer to write it down than it did to think of it

Cheers,

Cat

[norbert]

You might be interested in Scott H Young's Goals! An Interactive Guide which doesn't cover all areas of personal development but focuses on goal setting.

A personal development application is a good idea anyways. I am working on a GTD app these days (amongst many others).

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by Cat Dancer

But, just to make something up, suppose your system had a person name courageous things they've done as a way of recognizing their courage. Then the web application could ask them each day to name one courageous thing that they've done that day. And then after a week, or after a month, they could look back and see the 7 or 30 courageous things that they've done.

(This post goes off on a tangent slightly.) Something similar to this exists in 43 Things, which is essentially an online goal-tracking site (for free, no less). People can set themselves goals or "things" they want to do and then write entries on them. There are often goals like "Find 100 things which make me happy" or "Find 10 things that I'm proud of", which people write entries on as they find more things. So, if anyone wanted something like that, they might find that site useful.

[Adam]

I have a couple of quick questions about it...

First of all, what language would you be writing it in? PHP is easier for the user (sysadmin) to support, since it isn't compiled into a bytecode. Also, if it is written in PHP, I would probably want to help develop it as well, though I would probably not ask for any money for helping.

Second, what specific categories of personal development would you cover? You mentioned emotional mastery, i.e., managing fear, as an example in your original post... While that is a necessary part of the whole, it doesn't cover the overall topic of personal development. I don't believe that there is any one specific method for organizing all of the different elements that go into personal development, so a design consideration might be to set each individual topic up as a module that the end users can enable or disable for their specific accounts.

For example, one of the keys to defeating fear is to gain knowledge. One way that I can think of, programatically, is to have people put their fears in, then allow them to list things that they have learned about those fears, or to write down what they have done to face the fear directly. When a person feels that they have overcome their fear, they hit a button, and it gets archived.

This could also apply to overcoming pride, taking responsibility, and gaining unconditional love, if we wanted to start with the emotional mastery field first.

For the layout of a person's first page, it could be a good idea to copy Google's new personal page layout, as seen here: Google

Tabbed pages would be something to program in a bit later, of course, but each content box would be able to show important, relevant information from the modules that the user has enabled, such as their top five fears, items from their daily task list, random long-term goals (or goals that they have set to a high priority), etc.

My last question is, how much do you think it would cost to get something like this built? Chances are, I won't be able to pay for it, but I would like to see this done, so if someone else around here could be a buyer...

[placebo]

i was thinking abou similiar stuff. For example, some kind of expert system that will functionate like a psychiatrist. Problem is in evaluation of parameters, what parameters should we use. In final report app will give users tips what skills they should develop, periodic tracking of improvement.
Main goal will be jumping in higher state of awareness

[Cat Dancer]

Originally Posted by Adam

First of all, what language would you be writing it in? PHP is easier for the user (sysadmin) to support, since it isn't compiled into a bytecode. Also, if it is written in PHP, I would probably want to help develop it as well, though I would probably not ask for any money for helping.

I've recently begun writing some web applications in Haskell, because I like the language, and it has some nice features such as making it easy to avoid SQL injection attacks and such like.

For myself, I have no particular need to choose one particular language, I often write applications in two (or more) languages, each doing something which that language is particularly strong in. Certainly a particular application might have a PHP frontend.

Originally Posted by Adam

Second, what specific categories of personal development would you cover?

Well, that wouldn't be for me to decide! Someone who knows something about personal development, who wanted a web application developed, would tell me what they wanted the application to do and how they wanted it to work.

Fear was just an example, I expect someone who lives and breathes personal development would have a better idea than I do of what be a good first application to implement.

Originally Posted by Adam

For the layout of a person's first page, it could be a good idea to copy Google's new personal page layout, as seen here: Google

Tabbed pages would be something to program in a bit later, of course, but each content box would be able to show important, relevant information from the modules that the user has enabled, such as their top five fears, items from their daily task list, random long-term goals (or goals that they have set to a high priority), etc.

Right, this is an example of what someone might tell me to do. I'd ask questions (what order do you want the tabs in, and so on and so forth), and then I'd implement it.

Originally Posted by Adam

My last question is, how much do you think it would cost to get something like this built?

In my normal web application development business, I'd gather all the requirements, and make an estimate based on what the client wanted, and then tell my client: OK, my best guess is that this will cost $X.

In this case, (the idea I had this morning), I wouldn't be asking for any money up front. I would implement something, and then get paid back through the 30% cut (that I'm imagining would pay for the servers and also pay for my rent and groceries, eventually). Like I said, the downside is that it might take me a while to implement something, working part time.

Though if

Originally Posted by Adam

I would probably want to help develop it as well

other programmers are available to help, it would probably get done faster!!

Cat

[Cat Dancer]

Wow, what a cool process these web forums are! It was really neat to have an idea, write about it, get comments, and think about if I wanted to do it.

And the answer, in this particular case, is no. It was a good idea, but is it one that I particularly want to experience? Not really. At least, I think I can find an even better one

One thing that struck me as I read what I had written was that I said "I'm not that knowledgeable about personal development". Is that really true? No! I often give people good advice. So here was an incorrect belief of mine, unrecognized, unexamined, that now I've become aware of.

[Cat Dancer]

P.S. And I had already gotten one email from someone asking me if I could write them a web application

So as soon as I figure out what I do want to do... !