BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

I am about to begin a comparison of the various web-based help-desk/support centre software out there at the moment with a view to implementing one of them for my own business.

It may be a case of the “cart before the horse” seeing as I haven’t released any products or services yet to provide support for, but my plan is to have my virtual infrastructure in place early on.

So, the logical place to start is to gather a list of possible contenders in this space. So far, I have the following:

• Commercial:
• Ferrysoft Help Desk
• FogBugz
• HelpSpot
• HelpDesk Connect (added to the list, 9/Feb. Thanks, Terry)
• Open Source:
• BugZilla
• Double Choco Latte
• osTicket
• ZenTrack

I’ll update this list to link to the relevant reviews as I complete them.

Ian over at Userscape, made an interesting post the other day regarding the importance of cultivating readers by responding to their comments. Oops! This is such an obviously important thing that I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before (and respond to the comment that Ian left on one of my own previous posts).

“So if you’re going to do it then do it right otherwise you’re just wasting time which could be devoted to other matters.”

Too right! Thanks for the reminder, Ian.

I know “they” say it’s bad to switch blog software and let your URLs change and all, but I’ve just done it and switched to WordPress. However, in my case, I doubt that there’ll be any problems seeing as I have just started this blog and probably have no readers (and no links from anywhere) to speak of

I’ve never really used MS Project much, but thought this was an interesting article worth filing for future reference and thought. (found via majordojo)

I find most of Paul Graham‘s essays are always thoughtprovoking and interesting, and this one is no exception.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The full essay is here.

This is an old list, but could be good inspiration at some point.

One of the service areas that I want to explore with this business is subscription-based web services.

I’ve therefore been spending quite a bit of time looking into various user management/authentication/subscription packages that I’d be able to use. There are a heap of user management/login libraries around, but not that many that combine subscriptions and payment processing.

Some of the packages I’ve been looking at are:

• Amember
• Interlogy’s Profile Manager
• PHPGuardDog
• Omni-Secure
• Oscpro (This one’s more of a shopping cart package that looked potentially modifiable)

I haven’t found much discussion about these type of packages on the Micro-ISV blogs, or even web development forums for that matter. Does that mean that most Micro-ISV’s just sell their software as a package and aren’t into running hosted services?

The investigations continue…

Well, I finally have a blog up on my new business domain! A new adventure and journey is just beginning, although it will probably start off a little slowly as I still have my day job until I see how this is going to pan out (and I actually generate some income).

I have plenty of ideas and will probably discuss some of them here as the development process progresses. I have however been spending some time reading through some of the other Micro-ISV blogs, such as, Ian @ Userscape, Rapid Signal, My Micro-ISV, Safari Software, CodeSnipers and microisv. There’s an intelligent community of people out there with lots of interesting ideas who have thought through a lot of this small business stuff well.

Actually, it was a couple of posts from the above blogs (such as, this and this) that reminded me of the (potential) benefits of blogging from an early stage… so here I am!

The journey begins!