BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

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.

I first discovered John Gunning’s ISV blog, SmallISV, back in February. I was interested in his blog then as he is a fellow Aussie ISV. However, at the time, it seemed like he lost interest in posting to his blog, but now I know why: he’s been busily coding his first product, which has launched recently: Bi Documenter.
Congratulations on your first launch, John!

Here’s an old, but interesting post, on writing blog posts when you are picked up by a planet:
How to blog for a planet…

It may be interesting to those who are picked up by our friendly MicroISV planet.

“Skypecasts are live, moderated discussions that allow groups of Skype users anywhere in the world to discuss shared interests, from classes to computer support to cultural or political debates. They amount to the conversational equivalent of Web blogs, complementing the written interactions of blogs.”

Read the full article here [via ZDnet] and also this [via the Skype blog].

A few minutes after reading this, I started wondering if this could be something useful for our Micro-ISV community. Kind of like a virtual uISV conference – but no travel expenses! Especially convenient to those of us, like myself, on the other side of the world from the U.S.

I think this could be worth a go. Anyone agree? Feel free to post topic ideas for a first Skypecast in the comments here and I may just see if I can get something going…

…if there’s enough interest I’ll try and pick a convenient time for those interested and announce it here and the relevent forums. Now it’s over to you…

Looks like someone else is taking the Micro-ISV plunge!

John Moody is currently pondering his situation and thinking about what direction to go in. It sounds like he’s leaning towards the ISV route.

It appears his first product will be some kind of GTD-oriented task list manager app and he’s currently thinking through whether to develop for the web or desktop. I’d recommend, if he goes the web route, having an option to generate nice on-the-fly PDFs for printing.

As I’ve been doing some screen and site mockups, I have been looking around at the various icon libraries that are available.

I thought I’d share them here as others may find this a useful list (it’s a good starting point, anyway):

Ben, from over at the BRK Studio blog has released a payment component for Authorize.net. Hopefully this means that isvManage, his main product, will not be far behind.

I’ve been looking at options for packages like this for awhile now and am quite interested in having a closer look at it. I am hoping it supports a variety of software products, such as web subscriptions…

Another new Micro-ISV blog begins…

smallisv.wordpress.com… is by John Gunning and, although he’s only got two posts up at the moment, I’ll be interested in following his progress and his perspectives on starting a business from my side of the world (him being a fellow Aussie).

At this stage, I’m not sure what type of business he’s developing as he has even less details up than I do!

This is last week’s news I know, but I thought it was worth comment. VMware Server now being free is a huge gift to the Micro-ISV community, methinks.

I’ve downloaded it and given it a quick test, and it looks great so far.

I have recently been evaluating both VMware Workstation and Parallels Workstation with the view to using one of them to setup development web servers for my own Micro-ISV; instead this has saved me quite a bit of money with no loss of functionality. Cool!