Aaron Luryi '07 makes $1,500 a month without ever leaving the comfort of his room.
Luryi has been CEO of Nalsoft, the software company he founded, since his freshman year. The mathematics and economics concentrator from Long Island sells the programs AIM Log Manager, RuitLeaguer and Subtitle Player, all of which he created.
Luryi first created a version of AIM Log Manager for his own personal use during his freshman year. He wanted a program that would record his conversations for future reference.
"I chose to make it because it's something I use, and I knew how to do it," Luryi said. Though he has never taken a course in the Department of Computer Science, Luryi said he's been "tinkering around with computer programs since seventh grade."
"So now I'm pretty good at it," Luryi said.
In April 2004, shortly after creating the program, Luryi built the Web site Nalsoft.com to market and sell the program. The retail version included many new features, such as the capacity to sort buddies based on the number of conversations with the user, a graphing feature which tracks the number of conversations over time and a log of "buddy events" like signing on or off.
Despite the innovations, Luryi could not find a single buyer for three months. "I plunked down $70 to get a domain name, and I thought it was all a failure," Luryi said.
But in July 2004, Nalsoft found a customer. The program soon started to sell about one copy per week. Sales increased steadily over the next three years: Luryi now sells two or three copies per day, and raised his price from $14.99 to $24.99 as demand increased.
Most of Nalsoft's customers fall into two groups: college students and parents who are monitoring their children's Internet usage. For the parents, Luryi has created a special "stealth mode" which makes the program invisible on the computer and e-mails the conversations to the parents.
"I think that's very bad parenting, but I don't question it," Luryi said. "I'm just a businessman, I'm not going to make moral judgments. I personally wouldn't do that to my kids, but people have different parenting methods."
After his success with AIM Log Manager, Luryi expanded Nalsoft and now sells two other software applications, RuitLeaguer and Subtitle Player.
"Some of my friends are very hardcore Beirut players and form leagues, so I've made a software program to keep stats for the leagues," Luryi said of RuitLeaguer. The program tracks players, teams and "hit percentages" and includes a game simulation window where someone can click on the cups on a computer screen when they are hit in the real game.
"When I made this, I thought it would sell better than it has," Luryi said. He said he has sold about 12 copies of the program, which has been available on the Internet since November 2005.
Subtitle Player was born of Luryi's love for foreign films. The program enables users to download a film and its subtitle file separately and watch them together. Luryi said he has had many customers from France, Portugal and Mexico. Subtitle Player, which sells for $10, has netted Luryi about $800 total. AIM Log Manager still comprises 95 percent of sales.
"The reasons I commercialized it were that I liked being my own boss and being an entrepreneur," Luryi said. "I can't go into business right away when I graduate - I need capital and a good idea - but in the end I want to be the head of a large company that I create myself."
He said he invests most of his profits in stocks and mutual funds. But he has also used his earnings for travel - recently, to Cancun and Asia.
Luryi has already accepted a job for next year as a quantitative analyst at Goldman Sachs. He said he has not decided if he will keep Nalsoft in business.
"After I graduate I'll have a full-time job, so I don't know how much time I'll have to expand this business," he said.
In the meantime, Luryi said his business has been a success. "I guess there's no product out there exactly like this - a hardcore AIM logging program - with so many options, so conveniently," he said. "I found a little niche in the software market that hadn't been filled yet. As soon as I fill it, people dive in and buy."
