BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

From Wired: Vaporware: Better Late Than Never

The lesson for all good Micro-ISVs? Never announce product release dates!

Ian, a fellow Micro-ISV (who’s ahead of me with a released product!) has posted interesting thoughts regarding software-as-a-service. I thought I’d add a few comments…

“…but it sounds like he’s interested in doing something which may be sold as a software service rather than a straight download and buy.”

I could be wrong here but it sounds like he may be referring to the type of model where the user downloads and installs the software, and has to keep paying an annual fee to keep it from expiring. This isn’t what I had in mind. In actual fact a subscription-based web service is what I am going to try.

“When it comes to web services however, it’s a totally different ball of fish.”

Exactly! And this is the area where I will be concentrating my efforts. I live in a big tourist area, and those I’ve spoken to so far have shown quite an enthusiastic response to the types of features I would be offering. There are some services that offer small bite-sized chunks of my ideas, but none that are quite as broad.

Do I have the ideas? Yep, a plethora!

Could it all fall in heap and not make any money? Yes, it’s by no means a “sure-thing” but, even if it fails, it’ll have taught an awful lot about development, design and business that I could not have learnt elsewhere. And, I can always carry that over into one of the other software ideas I have…

Anyway, thanks for the comments, Ian.

There does not seem to be as much in this space as I originally expected. It seems that most Micro-ISVs are selling their software as download packages rather than using the software-as-a-service. I can understand the downsides to this model in terms of infrastructure if your service were to grow too big, but I’m still surprised there aren’t more people trying it.

Anyway, as things stand at the moment, Interlogy’s Profile Manager looks to be the best choice for me to build upon. Unless of course I stumble across something else in my virtual wanderings!

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 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.

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!