Tag Archives: start-up

Things you don’t need for v1.0

Few people launch software products expecting them to fail. But many products do fail. I don’t have any figures, but I think I can fairly confidently state that more commercial software products fail than succeed. You think your product isn’t going to be one of the failures. But so does everyone else. The only way to find out for sure is to launch. The sooner you launch, the sooner you will find out. I have banged the drum for releasing early before, so I won’t labour it here. But it begs the question – how do I launch fast? What do I leave out? Based on my experiences of launching 3 software products, this is what I would leave out.

Polish

As developers we (hopefully) all want to do great work that we can feel proud of. But, as entrepreneurs, we need to be careful not to spend lots of time polishing something that might be a turd. So ship v1.0 before it is polished. Early adopters tend to be fairly forgiving of a few rough edges, if they are interested in the direction you are taking. I spent 6 months (part-time) working on the first version of my AdWords keyword tool. It flopped. So I shipped the first version of my visual planning software within a few weeks of writing the first line of code. It was pretty bare-bones and a bit slow for plans with hundreds of cards, but it was enough to demonstrate the basic concept.

Designer website

You don’t need a beautiful, state-of-the-art website to launch your product. My own table planner software had a pretty ropey website (designed by me) for the first 10 years and it did fine. Just make sure the website clearly conveys what your product does.

Logo

You don’t need a professional logo for v1.0. The product name in coloured text using a font other than Arial will probably be fine. I did the initial logo for Hyper Plan in Microsoft Word Art in 10 minutes. Here it is in all it’s glory:

I only paid a designer to come up with something better once I was sure it was worth my while.

DRM/Payment processing

I shipped the first version of Hyper Plan without even setting up licensing or payment processing. Every time you ran it, it just put up a window saying that it would expire on a certain date and that a new release would be available by that date. After that date it just stopped working.

I only added licensing and payment processing once I had proved enough people were interested in the concept to make it worth my while. If you are going to take this approach, make sure you let people know that they will be expected to pay at some point.

Sophisticated pricing model

Ideally you want to segment your customers so you can charge more for the people who are prepared to pay more. But you probably don’t understand your market well enough to do this when you are starting out. So just pick a single price. I introduced segmented pricing for PerfectTablePlan in v4. Hyper Plan still has a single price.

Feature parity with your competitors

Trying to achieve feature parity with established competitors in v1.0 is a fool’s errand. Just pick one pain point that you think is not being well addressed and try to solve that. Make your lack of features a selling point by emphasizing how simple your product is to use.

Multi Platform

If it is going to take significant additional effort to release multi-platform, then just pick one platform to launch v1.0 on.

Extensive documentation

The first version of your product should be simple enough and well enough designed that it doesn’t need extensive documentation. My Hyper Plan software has been out for a year and it still only has a one page quick start guide.

Mailing list

Many people advocate building up a mailing list of interested people before you launch. It obviously helps a lot if you already have an audience in the market you are launching into. But, if you don’t, it takes significant time and effort to build that audience. I would rather put in that effort once I have something to show them.

Trademark

Why bother to spend time and money trademarking something if you don’t even know if anyone wants it?

Patent

I’m not a fan of software patents and I don’t have any patents after nearly 11 years in business. So I certainly wouldn’t waste time and money on a patent for v1.0.

Lawyers

If a bug in your software could kill someone or destroy their business, you should probably talk to a lawyer. Otherwise a boiler-plate end user licence agreement is probably fine for v1.0.

Company

I did create a limited company before I launched my first product to get a bit of extra legal protection. But its not strictly necessary (in the UK at least).

Trade-offs

It’s all a tradeoff. Obviously it is better to have a beautiful website than an ugly one. But is it worth spending lots of time and money on designing a beautiful website for an unproven product?

The best approach depends very much on your market and circumstances. If you are a big player with lots of money and reputation, then much of the above may not apply. If you are selling web design products, you had better have a pretty slick looking website for v1.0. If you are selling aircraft avionics systems then I hope v1.0 of your product is pretty polished.

South West Bootstrappers meetup No. 2

I am organizing a regular meetup in Swindon (UK) for people who are running (or are interested in running) their own bootstrapped (i.e. not VC funded) software product business for web, Windows, Mac or mobile. Come along and talk shop with other aspiring and experienced bootstrappers.

The next meetup is on the evening of Tuesday 25th August 2015. So far there are 14 of us signed up. You can find out more and RSVP at meetup.com/South-West-Bootstrappers/.

10 years a microISV

I have been running my own one-man software company for 10 years today. Coincidentally it is also my 49th birthday, so it is perhaps a good time for a bit of reflection.

I did a physics degree and then worked full-time as an employee for nearly 20 years. I developed systems in FORTRAN, C and then C++ for operational research, satellite image processing, printed circuit board design, environmental modelling and distributed systems. I learnt a lot and met some great people, but I yearned to strike out on my own.

I set up my own company in January 2005. I was a techie and had very little experience on the business, sales and marketing side of things. It was quite scary.

I released v1 of my table planner software PerfectTablePlan at the end of February 2005. It was very rough and ready, but I sold my first licence in less than 24 hours. PerfectTablePlan has exceeded all my expectations and is still selling well. I have sold over 40,000 licences with revenue well into 7 figures (£) to date.

I started this blog in April 2007. It has had over 2 million hits to date and has been helpful for promoting my consulting. But mostly I do it because I like writing, when I can find the time.

I started offering a consulting service in January 2008. I have provided consulting to lots of other software businesses, mostly 1 day engagements concentrating on marketing. That has been very interesting and has added some variety to my work. It has also been helpful to find out what works and doesn’t in other businesses.

I ran a weekend face-to-face training course for people wanting to start their own software business in November 2013 and March 2014 in the UK. The course is 460 slides + various exercises. I enjoyed doing it and the feedback was very positive. But it was hard work to get enough people in one place at one time to make it viable. I could do it online, but I think it would lose a lot of the interactivity that made it work so well. I would like to run it again in 2015. Email me if you’re interested.

I released v1 of my AdWords keyword tool Keyword Funnel in March 2014. This was a commercial quality re-implementation of various tools I had written to help myself run my long tail AdWords campaign for PerfectTablePlan. The plan was to produce v1 within a couple of months, part-time. But it ended up taking nearer to 6 months. Feedback became more patchy and ambivalent as I got closer to v1. But, having got that far, I decided to push it out anyway. It didn’t sell well, for various reasons which I might go into in a future post. I also decided I didn’t want to spend all day thinking about AdWords. So I stopped selling it and took the site down. But it seems a shame to have wasted that work, so I may resurrect it later this year as a free product.

I am just about to release v1 of my visual planning software Hyper Plan. I have worked on this part time since September 2014. I am very pleased with how it has turned out. But I have no idea how successful it will be (as was the case with PerfectTablePlan and Keyword Funnel). I think a lot of people could benefit from it, but it is in a crowded market. Watch this space.

I have attended various conferences for small software businesses and spoken at MicroConf (Europe), ESWC and SIC. It is always great to meet other people in the business.

I am a moderator and regular contributor on the Business of Software and bootstrapped.fm forums.

All sorts of strange and wonderful things have happened, including:

PerfectTablePlan has been used for some very famous organizations for some very famous events (which I sadly don’t have permission to mention). It has seated royalty, celebrities and heads of state.
PerfectTablePlan was used as part of a demonstration of the (controversial) first commercial quantum computer by D-Wave.
A mock-up of PerfectTablePlan, including icons I did myself, was used without my permission by Sony in their ‘Big day’ TV comedy series.
I got to grapple with some interesting problems, including the mathematics of large combinatorial problems and elliptical tables. Some of my customers are now seating 4,000 guests and 4000! (4000x3999x3998 .. x 1) is a mind-bogglingly huge number.
A well known wedding magazine ran a promotion with a valid licence key clearly visible in a photograph of a PerfectTablePlan CD. I worked through the night to release a new version of PerfectTablePlan that didn’t work with this key.
I found out that CDs are edible.
An early article I wrote for the blog generated 56k hits in a day and got me a mention in the Guardian newspaper.

I employed my wife as bookkeeper a few years back. But decided I didn’t want to take on any other employees. I outsource a few things that I can’t do, but I still do most things myself.

It has been hard work and a bit of a roller coaster ride. But overall, it has been great! I wonder what the next 10 years will bring?

The Web Startup Success Guide

startup_success_guide Bob Walsh has followed up his excellent MicroISV: From Vision to Reality book with The Web Startup Success Guide. While the first book is aimed squarely at at developers of desktop software, the second is aimed more at web-based start-ups. I have to confess, I haven’t had time to read my review copy of the accompanying e-book yet (I’m moving house, moving office and putting out a major new software release). But I see from the contents it includes chapters on:

the idea
choosing a platforms
tools
fund raising
social media
getting the message across

And interviews with

Dharmesh Shah
Eric Sink
Joel Spolsky
Pamela Slim
Guy Kawasaki
…and others

If it is anything like as good as Bob’s MicroISV book, it will be worth a read by anyone doing (or thinking of doing) a web-based start-up. It is currently $19.79 on Amazon.com. You can also buy the e-book from Apress. Here are some reviews from people that have actually read it:

Neil Davidson

Willie Faler