Serious opportunity for someone who wishes to work at home and who knows how to develop a simple applet.
I'm primarily a family lawyer who works in Edmonton, Alberta. In Canada, there is legislation called the "Federal Child Support Guidelines". This legislation requires lawyers who wish to calculate child support to work with some relatively complicated formulas and adjustments, especially in situations where there is shared or split custody. A link to the appropriate legislation is
http://www.canlii.com/en/ca/la...latest/sor-97-175.html
These formulas and adjustments, for the majority of family law lawyers, are encapsulated in a garbage program called ChildView, which you can "view" at
http://www.childview.ca. If you go to the pricing schedule, you will see that the licensing fee for this program is expensive: A larger firm, even on the discount schedule, will be paying $925.00 for the year.
The problem? I can do what this program does in Excel. However I have no clue (nor any inclination) on how to create a program that does this. My hunch is that a program like this could be built in Visual Basic or something of the like. If I had a competing program, due to my connections in the family law industry, I could sell it at a discount rate and still make a tidy profit. Why? Because the amount charged for this simple program is outrageous.
Therefore, this is what I need:
1) Someone who can program an applet, which will be backwards compatible all the way to Windows XP, to crunch the numbers required by the Federal Child Support Guidelines. Initially, this program would only have to deal with Alberta Tax Law (we aren't talking complicated tax knowledge...you just have to factor in provincial and federal marginal rates). In addition, it has to have the option to print this data out in a tidy, professional way.
2) This person needs to be available to maintain the program if needed. Ideally, this person would be, due to being part owner of the software, the tech support call person for the duration of the product's life cycle. However, I'd be willing to accept, once the program was created, an hourly rate contract payment to maintain the software.
If you fit these two criteria and wish to work at home and make some extra money, this is a good opportunity. Ideally you would be Canadian, but this is not necessary. Honestly I've had friends at home inquire about this job, but none of them have the actual skills to make said program.
This is my proposal:
1) Building the program, by itself (the only other thing required would be a short 4-5 page synopsis on how to access the code and edit it if someone else wanted to take over maintenance) would earn you 1/4 of the proceeds of any sale as a royalty fee.
2) Being willing to maintain it and upgrade the program itself (patches, troubleshooting, etc.) would be another 1/4 of the proceeds. That is, you are responsible for upgrading it and handling tech support issues via email.
In Alberta alone, ChildView has 3/4 of the market and over 300 active subscriptions. Across Canada, there are approximately 2500 ChildView subscriptions. In other words, ChildView brings in approximately 1.25 million dollars a year (@ ~$500/year), of which I'd imagine a vast majority is profit. I can't envision a scenario where at least 2/3 of that is profit (and that is if it is managed sloppily).
Sinking our teeth into 20% of the market (500 accounts) at a discount rate of 40% ($300/year) is $150,000, of which I'm estimating 80% would be profit before labour costs...means $120,000 to spread around. If someone were to maintain the program and handle tech support emails and such, there is no reason why that person could not earn $60,000 a year maintaining a simple applet and handling a few legal assistant emails and enquiries.
My job would of course be to sell the program to other lawyers. Most of this stuff spreads through word of mouth...although I'm not against mailing free 3 month trial copies to every family firm in Canada. Shrug.
Anyway, my work email is
mattottewell@leroyhiller.com. Email me if you wish, subject line: Childview enquiry. Eventually someone is going to help me with this and make some money...if not I'll just have to hire someone to do it. I'm not at that stage yet though, I'd rather have a partner rather than an employee...someone who has a vested interest in doing a good job.
Cheers,
Matt
I'm not sure the monster.com posting is clear enough, but basically this is an entry level opening for a computer enthusiast. What better place than Anandtech Forums to search for computer enthusiasts?
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