BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

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.

• XEN and the art of Virtualization
• Free VMware Server in action

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…

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.

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!

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.

To keep things moving, it’s time to set my first monthly goal, even if I have missed the first week already.

By the end of the month, I want to have a functioning Customer Portal/Payments Gateway up on my site. It does not have to be “finished” in terms of complete functionality but it has to be ready to create customer accounts and accept payments via at least one gateway (e.g. Paypal).

Why have I chosen this as my first goal? Well, I have one small customer with the possibility of a second one and this facility in place would be useful for them as well as myself. Also, being able to use & fine-tune it with a few actual customers will be helpful.

I made a decision tonight that I hope will help really get things going around here: each month I will pick one thing to do with my business and then I will have four weeks to research, develop/purchase and then implement a solution to that goal.
This came about as I was thinking again about payment processing and customer portals, etc and I realised that I’ve looked at this stuff before, yet still haven’t implemented anything!

From here on I’m going to (attempt to) discipline myself and proceed in a more structured way, including at least one post for each goal to be made here.

I think this should help me to focus my efforts and achieve real results.

Speaking of the offline side of business… I recently got my first set of business cards printed; And I’ve already passed out quite a few of them around town. So far, I’ve had positive reactions from those who have shown an interest in what I am doing and planning.

And, apart from the obvious benefits of beginning to get my name out and about in my local area, there is something to be said for having a physical item that can be picked up and held. Also, the act of actually spending money on something helped me to stop and consider how serious I am in this.

Somehow it confirms that this Micro-ISV thing is real – that it’s not just a business name, number and website. This is real! This is the next chapter of my career and life. I am really doing this.

It has reignited my enthusiasm and excitement levels!

So my recommendation is, if you too are starting a Micro-ISV and are serious about it (eventually) being a full-time gig, get some professional business cards printed and start talking about your ISV with the people around you that are interested. You may just be surprised at how much that can enthuse and motivate you.