Project 31-A

“E” stands for educational. The main purpose is to improve your education or knowledge, making money or moving up to a better job is a possible side-effect.   The keys for an “E” project is Early Adapter of a version 1.0 language, product etc. Ideally within 6 months of release “Academic Research Languages” and “Niche Languages” are an exception. Be prepare for 6 “wasted time” for every success Actually, the time is not wasted – you have increased your width of knowledge and patterns . Be product/offering directed. A few examples from my own past. APL/360 (in 1968) – main benefit was seeing what was seeing what was possible beyond currently available languages like Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, EasyCoder. C did not come into existance until 1973 B (that which C was based on) did not come into existence until 1970 Most developers have zero experience with this, which is still a much higher language than C# or Ja...

Today I had two different conversations with folks interested in doing startups. Both were in that pre-business plan phrase. A business plan is not just something that you write for Angel Funding, it is something to precipitate vague ideas into something concrete.   Often in the early days, people think in stream-of-consciousness.  The logic and thinking is fuzzy. The purpose of a napkin business plan is to get a framework, a skeleton to add muscle, flesh, circulation system and fat too. Without a framework, you cannot walk,  you can only slither. Changing the stream into snow (but not ice – you want to keep it pliable ).   To me, the first question is simple – what class of business are you thinking of?   Businesses can be divided to the following general classes: Producer : You build or create a sellable commodity. Your are the factory, examples: Selling Word Templates Selling Control Libraries Selling Accounting Systems ...

There are three main models for startup as the title suggests. In the old days before Open-Source, there was Share-Ware. Often Share-ware allowed a single person to produce a viable startup with no external funding etc.  Support was via email, there was no need for a website, and social media did not exist.   Today, a solo startup could technically make it – but it has the following risks: You get swamped trying to do everything – in fact, you may suffer burn out. If anyone sets their business crosshairs on your business, they can jump ahead of you because they have more resources Moving from solo to team runs a very high risk. There is learning curve to working as a team. If you are running solo, you will likely defer this change until it is forced upon you… Odds are that this will be in the middle of taking off… and the extra load on the single engine will cause the engine to sputter and your firm may crash instead of cash. If you do not have...

A is for “Academics”.  If you are a boot-strapped developer that learnt coding on the job, this is very likely not for you.   Academic literature is full of research that can be rolled into products or components. If you are a Computer Science Grad (or post grad) then a membership to IEEE and/or ACM is a must – solely to get access to their electronic libraries of journal and conference proceedings.   What you will discover are mountains of research which have not been developed into products or components. For example, one of my current project is to research and derive advance Role Base Access component that supports Policy, Distributed,  Temporal and Special.  I’m in the midst of reviewing the literature (for a bibliography of what I am reading is here ).  This type of system is needed by most large organizations – for example: Hospitals (HIIPA), Banks and other financial organizations, large corporations. If you google, you will find that there ...

“D” is for Developer. This means that the product is for developers! You are a domain expert! Examples of successful firms in this space are Telerik , DevExpress , etc. This is the type of project that you are unlikely to get angel funding for initially but it’s a viable business model with the exit strategy being selling off to one of the above.   The typical development system provides basic Lego blocks only. You provide custom blocks that deal with common specific needs (for example, doors and windows!). Below, I will first talk about Controls, the visual widgets.   Control Projects The key for success is success is a new or highly popular development system. Today, that would boil down to: Android (Java core) Windows Phone 7 (CLR core) You can actually jump start your development by looking for Open Source controls and examples of how to modify existing controls. For example, I found a nice color picker example for the Android. On your first pass, y...

C stands for Co-operative as in the co-operative game theory. Ideally this means striking a partnership with an existing business or software product firm. Your goal is to provide an add-on product offering for their product. The motivations of people are shown below:   You, the startup You have an existing market to target If your offering can be on THEIR site, you will get much higher sales at a lower cost Greatly reduced marketing cost Revenue sharing may be part of the agreement – view it as a “sales representative” commission. If you can get an exclusive agreement for 2+ years on your offering then you have that sweet spot called a protected market! Scope of project is usually reduced (you will be interacting, not building a complete system) Them, the established business Allow richer offerings to customers without cash outlay or risk. Allow your core competency to stay focus (especially is a small development staff) Possibl...

B is for bureaucracy – that hated of all things!  The two biggest producers of bureaucratic requirements are governments and union (as in Union Contracts). On the plus side, it often compels companies to buy software. Healthcare is one of the biggest ones but it require domain expertise often. There are many more, for example staffing levels at nursing home [ paper ]. You look at the requirements and start building a sellable application around that.   The key to this is to be first or early to market with compliance to the regulations. There are two approaches – producing a replacement system for what they are using. Your key selling feature is compliance, but you should be competitive on features (see prior post) produce an add-on. This means researching what people are using and figuring out how to get the data out/in. For example, many businesses use Quick Books. Many firms are customer request driven – they will not look at reporting requirements until the...