BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

This might be a useful offer for other Micro-ISVs out there; Atlassian Software, makers of the Confluence enterprise wiki and the JIRA issue tracking systems are offering 5-user licenses of Confluence or Jira for five dollars!! That’s right. $5.

Not a bad deal if you were looking at getting into wikis or issue tracking. Even if your company is big, if it’s just going to be your IT staff, or just as a proof-of-concept for documentation, this cannot be beat.

The only catch is that there is only three days left for ISVs to take up this offer. Go check out their stimulus page…

Looks like other Micro ISV’s are discovering the amazing resource that is Microsoft BizSpark. I signed up for this myself yesterday.

As Scott over at The Recursive ISV said, “…it’s utterly brilliant.”

Similarly to Scott, I too was wanting to develop the desktop portions of my ThoughtFiler project in Delphi 2009 but the price of entry is out of my league at this early stage of development and CodeGear don’t appear to have any equivalent programs running. I daresay this will be a huge mistake for them in the future!

Sometimes Facebook is a just a time sink and can waste a lot of time and others it can reconnect you with old friends who also happen to be heading down the Micro-ISV path.

Last week, through FB, I reconnected with an old school Friend, Paul, who is developing some of his ideas at HomepageHome. Unfortunately, he’s not blogging his progress yet
Anyway, I wish him all the best with his upcoming v2.0 launch…

Congratulations to Paul over at LogicalVue Software on making the jump to full-time Micro-ISV.

It’s great to see someone being able to pursue their dreams. All the best to Paul & his family!

Finally, after much initial excitement, thinking and planning, things are really moving again this time. Development has actually started on things… that’s it; it’s decided - next year I quit.

2007 was the year of making a start. 2008 will be the year of making it real!

To actually be developing now feels good. Better than I expected…

Ian hits the nail on the head with his post, MicroISV or Startup:

“A big part of which is which is determining your goals. Do you want to run a business with an office, a secretary, 10+ employees? If so that’s a startup. It may just be you in the beginning, but if you envision that environment as your endgame then it’s a startup. A MicroISV is a very different thing. It’s a lifestyle as much as anything else. Are you content making enough money to have a high standard of living, but not enough to have an office of employees? Would you rather run your business than be a manager in it? Are you content sacrificing a higher probability of success for a lower probability of getting rich? If so then you’re starting a MicroISV.”

Most people I have talked to about my business plans assume that my goal is to eventually grow the business to a nice office and numerous staff. They always give me puzzled looks when I explain to them that that is not my goal and I am embarking on this endeavour for both the challenges and the lifestyle.

Kinda sounds like a reasonable philosophy for Micro-ISVs, eh? At least as a starting point for one.

Especially after today’s major Skype outage, previously mentioned over here.

I’m thinking that today would be a good day for uISVs to use this outage to contemplate where we are too dependent on someone else, and where we need to setup alternative arrangements. And not just for our VOIP needs either, I’m sure we all have other services which we may need to have alternative arrangements in place for too.

I’m sure Gizmo has received quite a few new signups today…

As I’ve been reviewing some of my old feeds and links, I’ve been surprised by the number of ISV blogs and domains that are non-existent. Wow! Has reality really hit that many people that hard? I realise starting any business on your own is hard, but I thought the dreams and ideas of people would be enough motivation to keep slogging away at this. Apparently not.

That is sad, as Ian Landsman was referring to recently regarding how different things seem to be among Micro-ISVs…

“I guess this goes to show you that starting a MicroISV is still starting a business. It still takes incredible persistence. The barrier to entry may be lower, but only a small percentage actually make it the entire way.”

Very true. Even more so when you’re bootstrapping! Although, I may not be as far along as I expected by now, I’m still here, the dream is still alive and I am still determined to succeed.

I was recently googling around to see what the best way to setup a version control system would be for me when I came across the following article from Neville’s My Cantina blog:

Get up and running with TortoiseSVN and Subversion in 15 minutes

Just what I was looking for! Thanks, Neville.

What’s the record for the most stops and starts a Micro ISV can have and still be considered a business?
On the one hand, a new relationship has meant I haven’t gotten as far with the business as I could have, which has meant several months of little to know “business-thinking”.

The unexpected benefit of this is that once I (re-)started thinking about my ISV and various ideas it was all fresh and exciting again and I clearly see the direction I needed to go to with development. I also see what areas seemed so important before but are now less so.

If you’re bootstrapping, a hiatus can definitely be a good thing!