If you hire directly you can find competent employees in the Philippines with good english for around $2/hour USD.

Instead of charging students, you want to be charging the schools for licenses that cover all of their students.

Or, better yet, charge lawyers, REO brokers, etc where there is a large pool of customers that will not be phased to pay you a reasonable amount monthly and give it away to schools for free.

It doesn't seem like this is a new theory explaining why it was built as much as a theory explaining why there were people in the area to begin with.

This is one of the few posts I've come across that doesn't just focus on the self-congratulatory aspect of self-employment.

I've been self-employed for the past 8 months and I have struggled to find a balance between work, play, personal relationships, and health. It's nice to know that I'm not just terrible at this and other people have similar problems.

Cool product!

1 quick suggestion: on your sales page food is listed in ounces. I think it would be more helpful and may increase conversions with impulse buyers to list that as "X months of food".

We are running our sites across three AZs, all in US-EAST. Our three web servers (one in each AZ) are not even able to load static test pages from their EBS volumes at this time. We also have a Percona MySQL cluster across three AZs and we are seeing very degraded perfomance in the EBS volumes on all three servers as well. It seems like this is impacting more than a single AZ from what I'm seeing.

Well, we've gone from "degraded performance" to completely losing our EBS instance store for our master MySQL server. If we don't see resolution shortly we might have to look at promoting one of our slaves and moving forward from there.

We ended up promoting a slave to master, and moving forward from there. Our master eventually returned to service, and we'll promote him tomorrow after things settle down.

Interesting to note that we issued a reboot on our Master and it went away and didn't return for over 45 minutes - we thought for sure it would have to be terminated. API calls and console access was severely restricted, so even launching in new AZ's was problematic.

I've heard of Google offering trade credit for large advertisers, this seems to be a more mainstream way to accomplish the same thing while allowing them to charge 12% APR.

Seems like a fairly intelligent idea, but I can only see people with poor credit using this card long-term. Anyone with good enough credit to qualify for any good points card would be stupid to not use that instead.

I would advise a mix of both strategies. Auto-generated content can allow you to test a large number of keywords/niches, and you can go to town creating better versions by hand once something has proven itself to actually be worth the effort.

She mentions exercise later on in the article, and implies that she exercises regularly.

She does not give much details about that. 3 times a week half an hour "exercise" is one type, preparing and doing a triathlon or a marathon is another. From anecdotal experience when I just exercised I felt better, when I became a serious runner I started to feel amazing.

"You can't win if you don't play" isn't any less true with the lottery, you're just looking at much worse odds than other, more preferable, situations.