Who Will Buy?

I’m building a micro ISV. I’m a software engineer, so I’m writing some software. I’m being conservative while I’m getting started—I haven’t quit my day job. I’m not maxing out my credit cards for financing. I have an idea, but I’m prepared to try something else if it doesn’t work out.

Many successful entrepreneurs say that it is better to burn through your bad ideas quickly so you can find an idea that sticks and focus on it. And one way you find out if your idea is bad or sticky is by asking the people you expect to buy it: “If I had this—bread that was sliced so you didn’t have to slice it yourself—would you buy it?” Do this, they say, before you spend time actually building the bread slicer. That is what they mean by Sell-Design-Build-Sell. If no one is interested in sliced bread, move on. If sliced bread has already been done, people will tell you that, too. If people are interested in sliced bread then make it happen.

The software I’m writing is aimed at casual game developers, so today I waded into a Flash programming forum. Lots of casual games are written in Flash. Things didn’t go well. First I searched for keywords related to my idea, which turned up two likely discussion areas: games, and general chit-chat. I created an account, filled out my profile, read the forum rules, and wrote a post. Forums have to win a serious battle with spam or they become worthless. Unfortunately, even though I don’t have anything to to sell, my message—would this interest you?—looks like a spammy come-on. Worse still I didn’t see the specific rules of the games section of the site, and I didn’t tag my post with the appropriate name.

Mercifully my post was approved and I received a few responses, which highlighted a couple of interesting things: Firstly, there’s a big “back catalog” of Flash games written in ActionScript 2. Some new games are written in ActionScript 3. Secondly, although there are alternatives to Flash like Unity 3D and Haxe, they’re mostly technical curiosities for Flash game developers. (Of course, I did post to a Flash developer forum, and even there there is some evidence of developers departing for other platforms like the iPhone.)

Reading between the lines, I think there is tepid interest in the software I’m developing, but it might be best to approach the Flash game development community as two different constituencies: ActionScript 2 developers, and ActionScript 3 developers.

The Web Startup Success Guide

I have preordered The Web Startup Success Guide. This is Bob Walsh’s third paperback book. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality is his best-known book. His second book, Clear Blogging, is good too. I hope The Web Startup Success Guide will be Micro-ISV for the Twitter age.

Sell-Driven Development

The creator of COM once told me: “software works if someone will buy it.”

Yesterday I was listening to Episode 28 of The Startup Success Podcast, and guest Sramana Mitra emphasized startups should Sell-Design-Build-Sell.

A sensible plan for a startup might look like this:

1. Think of an idea for something people might buy.
2. Design it.
3. Build it.
4. Sell it.
5. Go to step one.

There’s nothing wrong with this plan: To be successful you must complete all of these steps. But the plan is very inefficient. As engineers, we can almost subconsciously filter out things that we can’t build, but we don’t have any intuition about marketing and sales. As a result we invest a lot of energy in designing and building things that turn out to be difficult to sell, and we go back to step one not richer but poorer.

Consider this: You wouldn’t write all of your software before you test any of it. The stuff you write will turn out to be crap because it doesn’t do what you wanted it to do and you will have to rework it to get it right. If things go really badly, you may have to throw it all out and try something else. So you don’t do that. Instead, you test your software as soon as you can.

But remember, software works if someone will buy it. And you can find out if someone will buy your software very easily—pick up the phone, or open your email client, and ask them. That’s what Sell-Design-Build-Sell does:

1. Think of an idea for something people might buy.
2. Find some people willing to buy it.
   • If nobody is willing to buy it, go back to step one.
   • Otherwise go to step three.
3. Design it.
4. Build it.
5. Call the people from step two back, and sell it to them.
6. Go to step one.

I’ve also made the bitter realization that I’ve heard Sell-Design-Build-Sell somewhere before: Three years ago, listening to Greg Gianforte’s advice on bootstrapping and reading his book. Three years!

Tomorrow I’m going to outline what I’m working on. Then I’ll send this to some potential customers and ask them if they would buy it.

Slowly But Surely

I’m writing a library to read this binary file format; I’m 25 pages through a 386 page specification. Slowly but surely my code base has grown to 500 lines of code. I had no idea I wrote code this slowly. At this rate I will be able to read these files—step one—by the middle of next month.

I found the result of today’s work gratifying: I downloaded a random file and threw it at my reader. It decoded the file header and printed sensible data. Unit testing is great. Now turn to page twenty-six…

Mac Developer Network Interviews Bob Walsh

If you need a nudge over the cliff to starting a micro ISV, listen to the Mac Developer Network interview Bob Walsh, author of Micro ISV: From Vision to Reality and other books. It’s much, much worse to not try than it is try and fail. Developers have to start learning by doing, and persevere through the failures that come with the demands of learning a lot of new things at once (like doing market research; advertising; and making methodology and technology choices without typical big-company constraints.) At least you’ll learn something.

Today, pleasantly, I committed two hundred or so lines of code—my micro ISV’s first intellectual property asset!

Hello, world

Starting tonight, I’m a micro ISV. I’m a software developer by day, and I really like my job, but when I read about micro ISVs I feel like I’m missing out on something—perhaps there’s a lack of essential ramen in my diet. From what I’ve read in Founders at Work, having the idea isn’t as important as working hard enough and for long enough to try out ideas until you find the idea. Tonight I set up a source code repository for the first micro ISV idea I’m going to try. I’m not ready to share this idea with you yet: First I’m going to do some research to see if the idea is technically feasible, and whether anyone has done it. But I will blog about what I find.