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…
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…
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!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the my in-progress business recently and I’ve come to one conclusion: I’m too unfocussed.
In order to try and cover myself when I quit the day-job, and guarantee a certain level of revenue, I came up with a number of alternative services I could offer to local businesses.
I now realise that I was heading into the dangerous situation of promising too much with too few “me’s”! A significant level of infrastructure would have also been needed to provide these services at appropriate levels.
It’s time to refocus on my original ideas: starting a small software company with a few products/services based around a single core concept.
Consulting/contracting will form part of the early stages of the company for income-boosting purposes, with the current day-job now seen from the perspective of being my first “contract”.
That sounds much better, scary, but better.
Stick to the basics!
I was pleased to come across a couple of posts on virtualisation recently.
Sometime in the next month I am planning on building a server to be a host for VMs, so these came at just the right time for me. I was planning on using VMware Server, which I have done a small amount of experimenting with, but Neville’s article about Xen makes we want to take that for a spin. I’ll also be taking a look at Parallels to see what their current offerings are like. Of course, there’s also Virtual PC and, possibly, rpath although that appears to have a different focus - I need to check it out further though…
November, 27th! Heck, that feels like so long ago now it’s not funny. Definitely what I would call a blogging hiatus.
So much for my monthly goals, eh! I did one so far (updates on that shortly). Some of you may have thought that I have given up on this whole Micro-ISV or “escape the cubicle” dream. Not at all! I still believe that there’s a market for my ThoughtFiler idea and I fully intend to build it, but… once I quit and am building it full-time I am pretty sure that I will want to eat, pay some bills and have somewhat of a life.
To that end, I have been rethinking my plans a bit. I have been thinking about contracting sources in my local area and of various other services I can offer businesses around here to provide income streams. I will post some thoughts on all this here shortly if only to provide clarity for myself (as I’m sure most of you have long since left for more exciting uISV blogs!)
Every so often I come across ideas that really excite me with their potential. Several days ago, I discovered Kiva.org which gets me more excited about their concept the more I look into it.
I suppose, in one sense, it’s a type of social networking site but, unlike all the others out there it actually lets people help each other in practical ways. Take a look at it for yourself.
They have a 1 page summary (PDF) that provides a good introduction to the concept. Here’s a short quote from their about page that summarises what this is all about…
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
And a 15 minute PBS doco on their MySpace page. I’m still looking into it myself but, as I said before, I find the whole idea real exciting!
Gee, I can’t believe it, it’s almost Christmas!
I also can’t believe that I haven’t posted anything here since July, which I guess means most of you have given up on me as an MicroISV dreamer with no follow-through…
That would certainly be an understandable assessment, as activity online has progressed slowly (to say the least!).
Offline though things have been steadily progressing. The plan is still to quit the day job and make this a full-time venture within the next one to two years. However, in order to do that I’m going to need more alternative income streams and, to that end, I have been evaluating various options around my local area. Opportunities that would use my current skill sets and mesh with my future ISV vision.
On the Micro ISV side, preliminary ThoughtFiler development has begun with an initial interface for the desktop version (the web services will come later).
Anyway, I’m still around and hope to be posting a little more regularly from here on.
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