BackupBrain: My MicroISV Venture

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.

A good post from Ian on FogBugz vs Helpspot as a help desk. Worth reading if you’re currently looking into this area.

I wanted to link to it from here as it nicely follows my previous comparison of help desk software. He also brings up a point worth thinking about early on regarding keeping your help desk and bug tracking software separate.

This seems like an appropriate spot to quote a few paragraphs from the NGEDIT site:

“I know, I know. I am aware that there are plenty of text editors in the market. One could easily think that there is no need for yet another text editor.

“But I don’t share that point of view.

“I think that text editing can and should be improved. It can become a much more comfortable experience. There is a lot of innovation yet to be done in text editing, and I hope to make NGEDIT a sound first step in that direction.”

His thought’s on why he’s developing NGEDIT are similar to why I wish to develop ThoughtFiler: some parts of my idea have been done before, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Even given all the potential competitors I listed in my previous post, none of them really come close to the vision I have for ThoughtFiler. Even though, initially, ThoughtFiler will look like a clone of some of them, my hope is that eventually, its scope will extend beyond them.

….

“Pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone — this is taken from Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business. Sometimes an idea catches hold of you and you find you can’t put it down. Pay attention to that! Just start working on it. Can’t get yourself to do anything on it? Move on. Find yourself waking up out of bed to write down new ideas about it? That’s a good one to choose.” [Source]

This is an idea that has been chasing and bugging me for going on four years now. I’ve finally decided to start paying it real attention. The more I seriously think about doing it the more I think it has legs.
And, the final reason? ThoughtFiler is a product I want to be using now. It frustrates me that it doesn’t exist. I can (obviously) see the benefits of my vision and I want it available so I can use it! I wanna eat my dogfood!

There are a number of reasons why it could be said to be foolish to pursue the development of ThoughtFiler.

One of the biggest reasons is that it’s becoming a trendy area. Many have ideas about it.

“Consolidating your stuff to an online service is an exploding area right now - lots of the storage services are differentiating themselves by offering this type of thing.” [Source]

A few more cons on the web side:

• Google. ’nuff said really. There are enough hints already that they eventually want to store everyone’s stuff. GDrive. Also, here. Also, now with confirmation of their forthcoming calendar they will have one more piece of the PIM puzzle. On the other hand, the (current) lack of integration between most of their services could be seen as a benefit to myself or others, at least in the short term. Also, the growing distrust and uncertainty of Google’s future plans could be a good thing - they don’t seem to realise that most people don’t want all of their files out of their control.
• Yahoo. These guys already have some leanings in the ThoughtFiler direction (sort of), ala their Addressbook, Briefcase, Calendar, Notepad, Wallet (?maybe), and 360.
• BackPackIt & Remember the Milk. These guys are up and running now and have a user base. However, they have chosen to basically service one PIM element: to-dos. In other words, they could be considered only partial competitors.

All the various new ajax home pages [source] “could” be said to be competing in my marketspace:

• Eskobo, favoor,Fold.com, Google,Goowy (Flash, not Ajax), Gtalkr (Flash), HomePortals,Microsoft Live, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, Wrickr, Zoozio.

…but realistically, at least at this stage, they are not really competitors, but more something that people may initially confuse as such (until they use one or more of them).
There is more competition from the desktop side however:

• Ecco Pro (even if it’s no longer being developed)
• Info Select
• Keynote
• sqlDesktop
• Treepad
• UltraRecall
  

Hmmm…

I’ve been blogging now for a couple of months and I suspect some may be curious as to why I set up this ISV. What is my first product?

Well, read on for the concept-in-brief…
Read the rest of this entry »

OK, perhaps my previous post was a bit of tease by only revealing the name and all. In this post, I will list what areas ThoughtFiler will not be targetting.
What the service is not:

• Another web mail client.
• Another search engine.
• A social networking site.
• A blogging service.
• Another portal/personal start page.
• Solely web-based.
• Solely desktop-based.

…although, it probably will integrate with most of the above in interesting ways. More on what it is soon…

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):

Good question. What is this web service that I’ve been hinting at developing on this blog? Perhaps it is time to up the “transparency levels”, so to speak, and start revealing some more details.

Let me start with the name: ThoughtFiler.

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…

Gavin Bowman’s written a food-for-thought post about good ideas versus execution:

If I believe everything I read: ideas are cheap; it’s all about execution. Developers are sitting on dozens of great ideas for products or services, if they only had enough time and funding. It wouldn’t matter which idea they chose, as long as the execution was right.

It’s a thought-provoking post, but one simple suggestion in particular jumped out at me:

Build a website or some basic product literature. Do you still think you can build it as quickly as you thought? Do you still think you can sell it? Is it still something you want to work on?

Interesting idea! I may do just that. I don’t think I’d worry too much about final layouts or anything, but the idea of writing up at least part of a product website describing the features as I envision them may be a useful way of seeing how realistic my plan is. As well, it’ll give me something to show to people when describing my idea.