Fast forward 270 years. Now we’ve got 30 year mortgages, income taxes, property taxes, death taxes, capital gains taxes, and student loans.

These are all weapons of mass indentured servitude.

By manipulating raw human emotions and hiding true costs, we’ve gotten much better at convincing people to work at running in place for longer and longer.

But at what point does the friction built into the system become so much that it feels as though we can’t make progress anymore?

In Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland, the Red Queen asks Alice to join in a race where you have to run as fast as you can to stay in one place. You can’t help but ask yourself if there isn’t a modern corollary.

So, how can I make sure I’m not running the Red Queen’s Race right now?

As an entrepreneur, I define my job as a wealth generator. Everything I do must take from a pool of limited resources, and end up creating more wealth from the other end. If I’m not creating more net wealth, I’m failing.

Notice I didn’t say my job was generating money, or creating profit. Instead of going the traditional capitalist’s route, I’ve decided to use wealth creation as my personal measuring stick.

In the beginning, I used money as my motivator. And money was a horrible motivator. The things money can buy are great, but for me personally, they simply weren’t a good enough carrot at the end of my stick. I’ve been around money, and I know it really doesn’t change much.

So I now measure wealth generation in the broadest sense.

How much wealth am I contributing to the world versus taking out?

And in doing so, I’ve come across a radical transformation in myself. Despite any outward circumstances, I now feel inwardly wealthy, as I look and measure myself in terms of wealth contributed.

That takes care of the motivation to keep running, but what of the results from what seems like running in place?

Learning to Ignore Your Present Results

When I started building businesses, I took great comfort in that statistic that 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first year. For me, it seemed like I was only 10 tries away from a winner, and building a lasting contribution to society. Five years later, I now realize it’s absurd to assume doing something important would only require 10 tries. Depending on the level of difficulty, a number like 1,000 to 10,000 is probably more accurate.

Like Thomas J. Watson of IBM said: “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

One thing I consistently see people getting hung up on is their expectation of results. I can relate, because I’ve only become aware of it very recently.

Top performers become indifferent to results.

Consider: If you wanted to become a world class writer, how much time would you give yourself to develop the skill, starting from zero?

A top performer’s answer should be as long as it takes. However, most people get caught up in looking for results, and run from one project to the next, never really following though to completion on any one thing. And we’re all guilty of this.

But I Need Results Now!

I’d argue that this is the core reason people get stuck in running the Red Queen’s Race. We get caught up in focusing on our immediate needs, and never take a longer term approach.

So how do we pick, and how do we stay focused? I’m already old, I don’t have the time to invest 10 years in developing skills to be at the top of my chosen field. I need results now!

This short sightedness is really one of the greatest reasons I’ve seen for the destruction of wealth.

Consider the housing prices in 2006. We all knew that houses would be unaffordable for just about anyone. And yet everyone wanted to refinance and get access to all that hypothetical equity now.

Taking the long term picture and minimizing our financial footprint are boring exercises. They don’t change anything radically, and yet they are precisely what builds the wealth we all dream of having.

But we still see bubbles within the marketplace, and we still have kids taking out massive loans for schools that don’t guarantee a real income. We’ll continually be hustled and dragged down from every which way if we don’t become conservers, and manage to limit our real needs.

So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself.

The Challenge: Building a $500 / mo Product in A Day

For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing?

I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency. That is, finding a pain point from within the web.

Deciding to Build Something Small

I decided to build some sort of plugin for an Open Source web project. I’ve noticed a real inefficiency here. All the good programmers are out there building the next Twitter, not making life easier for the businesses using Open Source software.

But which Open Source web software? To find out, I pulled up Google Trends, and searched for my potential targets:

As you can see, WordPress turns out to be the great big old winner. It simply gets searched for more often than my other two potential targets combined. And it’s growing like crazy.

A perfect market to search for inefficiencies.

Total Time Spent Finding Market: 2 hours

Narrowing It Down: Finding Unserved Pain Points

The most obvious market for WordPress is within Commercial themes. However, this market is pretty damn competitive, with multiple companies already established making 7 figure incomes. I decided building a complete theme and finding a place to market it in a single day was too obvious a path.

Seems WordPress plugins may be an interesting niche.

So instead, I focused on secondary needs. What is the purpose of WordPress, and what’s a user’s greatest pain point that isn’t being served?

In my case, I decided it was figuring out what the hell to write about. Having run a company, I know that it can be a pain to write content about widgets every day. I mean, how much can a person say about widget x?

Problem Definition: Making it easier to come up with ideas about what to write about.

Having the Aha! Moment

So again, I began researching. How do writers aggregate data relevant to their topic?

The answer was by monitoring RSS feeds, twitter, news sites, etc.

So my product would put that very front end right into WordPress. Grabbing RSS feeds, and putting them directly into the WordPress backend.

This is going to be our product.

Product Definition: RSS feed aggregator integrated into WordPress with the ability to put excerpts into post automatically

Total Time Defining Product: About 30 minutes

Leveraging Existing Technology

So we’ve defined our product roughly. The question now becomes:

What existing technology can I leverage to solve this problem?

It turns out, there’s an incredible library for manipulating RSS feeds in PHP called SimplePie. It’s dead simple to use, and it’s got great examples. I build upon one of the examples and get my RSS feeds working in under an hour.

Plugging into WordPress

I don’t want to say WordPress is poorly documented, because it isn’t. However, it is pretty dry to read technical writing. That being said, my next job was to bring my nice SimplePie based RSS reader right on into the WordPress backend.

To do so, I needed to create a plugin skeleton for WordPress, and add a plugin for TinyMCE. These two meant I had to go back and forth between the WordPress and TinyMCE documentation to figure out how the two fit together.

But once it was all plugged in, I had a working prototype another hour and a half into my actual work.

Total time to build the actual product: 2 1/2 hours

Finding a Marketplace

This was the real opportunity for efficiency. As part of my experiment, I didn’t want to spend a dime on building a market or processing sales. As the day wore on, I decided this could make a great example for someone with absolutely no monetary resources.

So I began researching markets to publish my Commercial WordPress Plugin to.

There was my old favorite, the Envato Marketplace, but they charge a ridiculous commission structure. Something like 50% if you decide you want to retain control to your own product.

That’s just a little too high, even for me.

So I kept looking, and found this great site, wpplugins.com. Turns out they only want a 10% commission to add your software to their marketplace.

However, they insist upon all plugins being released under the GPL, and so I needed to go back and make sure all my code had the GPL inserted into it. However, I signed up for an account, created a zip file, and began writing the documentation for my plugin.

All told, creating some screenshots, writing up a description and cleaning up code probably took more time than writing the actual software.

Total Time Finding Marketplace, Writing Copy: 3 hours

Success! The product has been built and sent out in under a day!

Finally, Watching the Money Roll In

With the marketplace I chose, there was a delay in waiting for my plugin to be approved. However, from the very first day I had sales.

I chose a very low cost for my product, because I believe people don’t have a problem paying for something if it’s less work than pirating it.

That being said, my product is being sold at $14.95 per copy. If you’re interested, you can see a video of it in action below:

You can check out the final product, Content Avalanche here.