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Josh MacDonald

Net Worth Projections Based on Life Choices and Financial Assistance

In your 20s is when the net worth of your peers starts to radically change and grow. Those that were born poor are no longer poor and those born rich may not stay rich.

There are two major factors on how your net worth grows. One is whether you take a safe and secure 9-5 job or take the risk going self-employed with hope to make more. The other major factor is whether or not you received financial support – usually from family. However, government support exists for those without family financial support, as long as your family doesn’t make too much money. If your family makes a lot of money and they are unwilling to help pay for education for example, you are SOL and fall into the category of no financial assistance. If you are able to get financial support from family, you will be further ahead than your peers – obviously. In this article, I’m going to graph the 4 combinations of the above factors.

Situation A: No Financial Assistance, Take 9-5

Assuming you were not given money from your parents to get you a head start on life, and you decide to avoid risk of starting your own business, you’ll have a slow linear growth until you enter the work force full-time and then your net worth will stay on linear growth at a higher rate for the remainder of your life.

Situation B: No Financial Assistance, Start Company

This is where I identify. I was born into wealth, but never got breaks that you’d typically expect. When compared with kids from families of similar wealth – I paid for my 3 vehicles, gas and all the insurance associated. Throw in my boat, side by side, dirt bike – you name it. I wasn’t given assistance on a house. Essentially, if I couldn’t pay for it with my own dollar, I didn’t buy it. In the short run your life won’t be glamourous. You’ll have some fun because you feel you deserve it after working double the hours of anyone else, but real money won’t start until your primary project has mature success. This could be in your 30s, or more likely your 40s or 50s.

Situation C: Take Financial Assistance, Take 9-5

If you’re in this path, you’re basically just following the path that was laid for you. It’s simple living, stress free. You will rarely have debt in your own name. Life will be very easy, but rewards will also be limited until your inheritance starts to trickle down in your 50s if it’s available.

Situation D: Take Financial Assistance, Start Company

This is obviously the most optimal position you can be in. These are people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Born to doctors and attorneys, sent to Harvard and take the risk to start a business with the resources they’re given and succeed massively. Of course success isn’t guaranteed, but with startup resources, it’s much more likely than those in situation B. Your net worth is consistently ahead of those in situation B and your company also succeeds earlier thanks to financial assistance.

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Ego vs Confidence

Disclaimer: Another self-reflection rant…

I’ve had an ego for a long time and I think I am one of few from the subset of those who have such an ego as I can recognize it and acknowledge it. I think ego is easily attained by realizing how much one has accomplished given one’s obstacles. Obviously ego is also bred from other sources, but I think that’s where mine came from. No one person has experienced an identical set of obstacles on their path to success – some may have faced similar and those people become close friends often enough. As these once substantial accomplishments age, they become more normal in your mind by nature, and ego returns to control.

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Best VPN in Canada: Here’s Our Top 6 VPNs (Updated For 2026)

Are you searching for the best VPN for Canada, whether it’s for unblocking streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, secure torrenting, or ensuring data safety? Our comprehensive guide ranks the top VPNs on the market, emphasizing speed test results, affordable options among the best cheap VPNs, and high-quality VPN apps. We’ve evaluated each VPN’s speed, use, and protocol to ensure you find the best fit for your needs. From premium VPN services like Netflix to various streaming sites, our list of the six best VPNs in Canada caters to those who want a VPN for versatile online activities.

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Best Budget Rank Trackers

There are hundreds of rank trackers to choose from – some expensive and some cheap. Some are even free. I like to have a separate rank tracker for each venture so when I sell the company, all assets stay together. It also allows my partners to view one project’s SERPs without seeing everything else I’m involved in – and it also help keep my finances between projects start.

Sometimes I want a rank tracker just to watch 2 or 3 keywords, so I’m always on the lookout for budget rank trackers that are either free or $10 or less per month.

Rankitor

Rankitor is who I am currently using. They are owned by Pro Rank Tracker which starts at $25/month for only 200 terms. Previously, they had a free plan but have since removed that. Rankitor has a $5/month plan which I’m happy with. It covers 20 keywords. Since it is a new platform though, you will come across the odd bug.

SerpRobot

SerpRobot is a favorite on the SEO forums. It is entirely free. The only problem is it’s not technically a rank tracker. Instead it’s like a rank checker, which can only check on a keyword for you. Ideally it’s nice to monitor positions so when they go up and down, you know when and can attribute it to an onsite or offsite SEO change you made.

SerpFox

SerpFox has been around for a while. They previously had a free plan but removed that and instead offer a starter plan for $10/month which covers 100 keywords. If you need between 50 and 100 keywords checked, this is the better value than Rankitor but if you need less than 20 keywords monitored, Rankitor will be the better option.

SEOlium

SEOlium is the only tracker on the list that is pay per use. I like this, especially as someone who doesn’t track many keywords. However, the pricing can be a bit complicated as you have to measure based on the frequency you want checked. For reference, 25 keywords checked daily is $3.75 per month making SEOlium the cheapest paid rank tracker on the list. The problem with free plans is they get discontinued often and free customers have no priority. Paying $3.75/mo is almost free and you know that your keywords will be checked.

Keyword

Keyword.com is the successor to Serpbook, which was founded on the black hat forum Black Hat World. It is the most expensive rank tracker on the list at $24/mo for 100 keywords.

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The Non-Technical Founder Has Made It to 669 Libraries so Far

I’m extremely proud of the library coverage of my book, The Non-Technical Founder. We are now in 572 libraries across the USA.

Schools like MIT, Stanford, Yale, Brown and Columbia University have The Non-Technical Founder in their library for students to checkout.

Outside of the USA, the book can be found in the following countries: UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Paraguay, Turkey, Brazil, Cyprus, Armania, Lebanon, Nigeria, Iraq, UAE, China, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Colombia and Ecuador – and the list is constantly growing.

I would like to thank my publisher, and all of my followers and readers who have helped spread the word.

Click here to download the full list of libraries as of Apr 18, 2020.

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The Keyword Scout Legacy

As many of you know, Keyword Scout was one of my first successful ventures years ago. Then, I was 16 years old, and even though I was new to the software business, I was able to pack in over 1000 paying customers within the first 6 months.

For those of you who read my book, you already know the rest of the story. PayPal closed my account, with no reason. This means all of my liquid cash was frozen and unaccessible. All of my customers’ subscriptions were cancelled. I had no monthly recurring revenue.

I tried to follow up, but no one at PayPal would talk to me. Every time I called or emailed, I was told I had to speak with the employee who limited my account. The problem? He didn’t have an email and he never returned voice mails.

So, I started trying to get customers to sign up again with a new payment process and some did, but many did not answer their emails. This is expected with cancellation of subscriptions – most will not resubscribe until they need it again.

The company had a slow and painful death. If you’re interested in the full story, you can find it in my book.

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Users don’t read labels

I own a company called Slide. It’s functionality doesn’t matter, so I’ll save you the time and won’t explain it. 

I’m sitting here on a Friday night, watching HotJar recordings of my users, to see where I can improve.

This particular user filled out his/her information, and like many other users, is too lazy to read the labels on the buttons. So instead of clicking “Save” like they should, the user clicks the “Delete” button.

But it doesn’t stop there. I figured this would happen, so I threw in a confirmation box before people did this.

Guess what – the user clicks confirm, immediately! Boom, account is gone. They are redirected to the homepage, so not knowing what they just did (because they refuse to slow down and read) they go to login again. For the next 3 minutes, I watch the user attempt to login again, and sit there, puzzled when they receive an error.

As a web developer, it’s not just my job to write good code, but to build a good UX (user experience) by having a detailed UI. More on this in my book.

However, the changes I have to make are:

  • Make the save button blue
  • Make the delete button red
  • Make the save button the same size as the delete button or bigger
  • On the confirm dialog:
    • make the confirm button grey
    • the cancel button blue (this will encourage clicking cancel subliminally)
    • change the confirm button label to “Delete” – in hopes by chance they may finally start reading labels
  • After account deletion, have a page that explains why the account was deleted
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How I prioritize my ideas

Most creative people have tons of ideas. Regardless of what you or others may think, most of your ideas could probably be profitable. Lately I’ve been looking at new ideas in a different way. I’ve been sorting them by time – in two ways.

First, time to market. How long is this idea going to take to get users, and eventually sales? I am getting bored of doing software companies that are 6-18 months in development before I start seeing money and that is on the quick side of things in the startup world. I am starting to turn to my ideas that show signs of potential revenue within 30 or 60 days.

Second, is the idea reliant on time? Is there an advantage to launching the idea now vs waiting 6 months? If it can wait 6 months, you should always wait and look at something that needs to be done now. There’s very little benefit in rushing to market if the idea isn’t time sensitive.

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How To Handle New Ideas

When I get a new idea, I like to sit on the idea for a few weeks, sometimes months or even a year. You can only do this if the idea isn’t time sensitive – something evergreen. What happens with most people is they get a new idea and execute based on spur-of-the-moment emotion, then few weeks later, they’re either burned out due to overworking on something they had no interest in, or it wasn’t as good of an idea as they initially thought. Usually bad ideas can still be executed into profitable businesses, but if you truly can’t stay interest after the honeymoon phase has passed, you’ll have a tough time bringing your venture to profit.

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NY Times reveals the fake followers business

This is an informal response and my initial raw thoughts on The Follower Factory. Excuse any typos.

Saturday, The New York Times published The Follower Factory, which explains the age-old story of celebrities purchasing fake followers. The article exposes Devumi, a company that manages 3.5 million fake social media accounts so they can offer social-boosting services to high profile people. I was first surprised when I heard the company was based in America, as it’s quite common for companies based in India and other countries to take advantage of the offshore benefit by offering social media services and software. FollowLiker is one off-shore software that can be blamed for millions of spam likes, comments, follows and DMs sent to Instagram and Twitter users every month. If any social network knew who was responsible for it’s creation, a lawsuit would commence as they regularly have in the past against its competitors.

The NYT concluded the company has likely provided over 200 million followers, which I don’t think is that many in the big scheme of things. FollowLiker generates more than that on a monthly basis. Kim Kardashian has 106 million followers, which I’d bet more than 50 million of those are fake. Some may argue she runs engagement rate that averages a solid 2%. While 2% is an impressive engagement rate at that level of fame, the likes, to a degree would also be purchased. There’s too much money at stake for her to not keep that rate above 1%.

The problem with a lot of Devumi’s competitors, is the purchased followers look fake. The names look fake – the biographies, the profile picture, the location – it usually just doesn’t make sense and the profiles can be spotted easily. They are one of the most unique services on the market, since they’re able to offer American names, with realistic profile photos and the whole bit.

What writers Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris and Mark Hansen don’t understand is that these services aren’t just used to benefit others, but also to harm others. Allow me to explain.

Being someone of moderate success at a young age (for those who don’t know me), I’ve gathered a few people who are jealous of that and look for ways to harm that or disrupt my wellbeing. Yesterday I woke up to the notification of hundreds of followers being added to my Instagram account every few minutes. For one thing, that’s sure to annoy me for the duration of the campaign, but also put a real cap on my future engagement rate and not to mention the embarrassment of someone calling me out for buying followers when I really didn’t.

I can block the followers. I can report them, too. However, I don’t have the time to do it for thousands of accounts that can be added at the click of a button. I can turn my profile to private, but that just leads to thousands of follow requests that I don’t have time to individually deny. Instagram does not have the methods in place to handle such an incident, and frankly, they don’t care.

The NYT also drew some far-fetched conclusions on the customers of Devumi. They say there were court records on this but I didn’t see any links to sources, so I’m going to conclude that because NYT discovered that Devumi has accounts that follow celebrities, they believe those celebrities purchased followers from Devumi.

First, understand that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram understand exactly how normal users act when signing up for a social network for the first time. There are specific actions and mistakes that a real person makes when signing up. They click in certain places. They pause on certain pages for certain amounts of time. As soon as someone doesn’t correlate with the data of real users, an account is locked, the IP address is flagged and it causes a lot of issues for companies trying to create fake accounts at scale. It gets complicated quickly.

There’s a page in the Twitter signup process where Twitter asks you if you’d like to follow any famous accounts and it suggests about 20. I dare you to click the little “skip” button and see if your account gets locked. I’m sure it will. So, to properly scale out a mass account registration campaign, you’d need to follow celebrities. Either when you’re prompted at registration, or later on, you mix in your followings with celebrities so it seems natural. Most people follow celebrities, so fake accounts should too.

Another reason why fake accounts would follow celebrities is so that Devumi’s clients cannot get discovered. What if their arsenal of accounts only followed people who paid for it? Well Twitter could wipe all of Devumi’s clients by looking at the followings of 1 fake account, which is what happened to one of my Twitter accounts upon testing this.

So just because an arsenal of fake accounts follows a celebrity, it doesn’t mean that celebrity volunteered to be involved. A company like Devumi would just be using that celebrity, to fool the social networks – and apparently The New York Times reporters too. I’d expect Michael Dell’s name to be removed before he realizes what they’re accusing him of.

What’s amazing is that if they actually control 3.5 million accounts, they’d need 3.5 million unique, low-risk, residential IP addresses to manage those and the only company on Earth known to provide that is of course, Luminati, but that’s a story for another day.

Questions? Comments? Hit up myself or any of the writers on Twitter. Kudos to the writers, it was a fun read. Good work.

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