Lotsa eggs, lotsa baskets!
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… 
“Deaths” in the Micro-ISV community?
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.
Setting up version control…
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.
And I’m off again…
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!
The need to refocus
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!
Interesting Virtualisation links…
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…
PMwiki: Great for Micro-ISVs…
This is a little late, but I’m going to comment anyway
A couple of weeks ago, Bob Walsh posted about plans for his mymicroisv.com site and mentioned that he was going to add a wiki to the site. I added a brief comment over there about PMwiki being easy to setup and use.
I just thought I’d add that I also have a private copy, sorry not ‘net accessable, that I use almost every day to track anything and everything related to my business. Any ideas I come up with for ThoughtFiler or other potential products or services go there, budgets, plans, goals and pretty much anything else I need to record about the business goes into the wiki. Makes it quick and easy to retrieve later.
Enough hiatus already! Time to get back to business…
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!)
Kiva.org: Helping developing world ISVs…
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!
Mini-Site experiment
Ian Landsman, of Helpspot fame, has just launched his first experimental “mini-site” here: Open Source Help Desk List.
I like the honesty and confidence that this shows: honesty because the site doesn’t hide the fact that this is helping to drive traffic to the HelpSpot site, and the confidence that he obviously has in his product to hold its own against the competition.
It’ll be interesting to follow the results of this experiment to see how much of an impact this has on his sales.
And, Ian, the only other opensource product I can think of that you’ve left off is: ZenTrack.