App Release: Should I Buy It?

I am thrilled to announce the release of my very first app in the Google Play Store “Should I Buy It?”!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiodev.shouldibuyit.app

I started this app almost a year ago, right when I started learning Android development.  And let me tell you, I think I’ve re-written this entire app about 4 times now!  After a few months of tweaking (and learning in other side projects) I’d realized I had approached something wrong, so I’d rip it out and do it a better way.  This went on and on as I learned more.  It wasn’t quite feature-creep, but implementation-creep.  I had to do things the right way!  They had to be perfect!  Remember that movie “Indie Game: The Movie”, where Phil Fish completely rewrites Fez like 800 times?  I started to feel like that.

So last month I realized Phil Fish might be the last person I want to turn into, and I just need to get my app out there.  Yes, I had a million ideas of how to make my app better.  No, it wasn’t my idea of ready.  But really….. if I kept this up I might never finish. I’d rather let people start playing with it now, and iterate quickly to make it better, than never get it out there.  So I bit the bullet, and now my little app is out in the world. Yay!

Personal finance has always been very interesting to me, but I was largely inspired to write this app by a blogger Mr Money Mustache.  He does a great job of showing people quick ‘back of the napkin’ type calculations that expose their ridiculous level of spending, and inspire them to improve their lives.  I wanted my app to be that quick tool you can whip out at any moment to see how bad it really is to eat Illegal Pete’s for lunch every day.

Compounding interest is not an easy thing for most people to grasp, and really not an easy thing to calculate on the back of a napkin.  With my app, you don’t need to understand the math behind compounding interest.  I hide the math, and just let the app expose the fact that frequent small purchases are really where you lose the most money, not the one-time big purchase.

For example, if I blew $450 on a designer pair of shoes that I knew I’d wear for the rest of my life, I would have sacrificed $885.22 in potential earnings (over a 10 year period).  However, if I drop $15 on lunch out each day, I’ve now sacrificed $79,294.58 over a 10 year period!

HOLY. COW.

I would WAY rather have a pair of designer shoes AND an extra $78,409.36 than a burrito and a coke each day! But the crazy thing is, in our culture it seems paralyzing to buy a $450 pair of shoes, but totally normal to buy lunch every day.  So that is the goal of my app: to help people get their heads around the fact that its actually the tiny repetitive purchases that are eating away at their money.  (Side note: This is why Family Dollar is a multi-BILLION dollar company.)

I am currently reading a phenomenal book called “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life” by Alice Schroeder.  In it I learned that Warren Buffet himself actually thinks about each of his dollars in a similar way as my app (though, at a higher rate of return, and over a longer time period).  There is even a part in the book where he analyzes spending on what most people consider cheap mundane things, and he says “Do I really want to spend $300,000 for this haircut?”.

So do you really want to spend $79,294.58 on lunch?