The Recursive ISV

After being out of software development in any real commercial sense for almost six years now, a foray into audio (my other love) and a lengthy stretch of personal, debilitating illness I’m at last ready to strike out with a new business as a mISV.  The software I’ve chosen (which I will disclose here in this blog in the coming weeks) is something I have domain knowledge in.  It leverages my audio skills as a musician and trained audio engineer as well as over thirty years programming.  It seems to me to fit well.  It’s not designed to attract offers from VC’s or become the next Google or Facebook.  In fact the idea of becoming such a thing does not appeal to me at all.  Rather something that feeds and provides the kids with an education and offers a comfortable life-style is the ultimate goal of the entire exercise.  It’s not strictly B2C and it’s not strictly B2B but rather a blend of the two.  There are existing similar app’s but they are amateur and miss targeted.  There is nothing at the pro level for this below the thousands of dollars mark.  It’s aimed at folks who are novices and does not pretend to be anything a pro audio person would use, though it will incorporate pro features and the audio engine is very powerful.   It is not a “media player” like iTunes or WMP or WinAmp.  It will cost $’s to purchase and it will include a type of “consumable”. 

One of the big issues I faced doing this the last time around (it seems so long ago now) was that I was solo.  That meant I had limited amounts of time and motivation to do all the things one has to do on their own.  This time my wife is partnering with me. By profession she is a teacher, which fits well with the primary product, and she’s frankly had enough of teaching, the kids are eleven and thirteen now so she has the time to be involved.  She’s never been keen on computers but recently has completed several units in computing and this is also ongoing.  I think this is an advantage, that she can now use a computer but is still a novice.  It helps with R&D and it helps with design and testing.  It’s harder for my assumptions to slip through the alpha cycle.  Naturally this is a short term advantage as she will progress to a higher level of user in the future, as most people ultimately do.

We face a few startup problems, who doesn’t?   My illness and the fact that she has been doing home duties for many years now means cash is a commodity that is scarce.  We both need new machines, a compiler update, widgets for the compiler, domain names and hosting (we have the latter already) and all those things that come with such a venture (we are fortunate in having a relatively secure though abysmally small steady income that literally allows us to scrape by at the present time so eating and paying the mortgage kind of stuff are covered).  There’s no way I’d borrow for this as I have an allergy to debt of this nature so I need to raise capital.  Enter my car.  Even though we live in the outer suburbs I’ve sold it to finance this.  My wife has her car of course, but I’m not permitted to drive that. :-)   So it’s trains for me!

At the time of writing I have sold the car, bought a new dual core Pentium (new monitor to follow) with four Gigs of RAM and a terabyte total of HD space.  I’ve handed my old dev’ machine to my wife as initially a single core with a Gig of RAM will be just fine for her.   I’ve updated to Delphi 2007 and started buying widgets where I can to save on dev’ time.  I think this is important.  Just because you can code it doesn’t mean you should waste extra time doing it.  So I’ve begun buying widget sets (components) that I require in order to get look and feel right without having to code in minutiae.  Very happy with the first mock-ups for this reason.

But cash wise this is pretty much exhausted now so we need to raise more.  I ran an experiment on eBay over a year ago with quick and easy to develop software and discovered to my amazement it sold extremely well (enough to live off, albeit not live well).  For various reasons at the time I did not pursue it further.  We will be (we have!) developing a series of applications (twenty to start with, all with the same code base but for different purposes) with which to leverage this and gain the extra income.  The core product took eight hours to code.  Each application then takes another eight or less to snap in (reports, UI differences etc).  To my mind these are attractive looking programs, care was taken with the UI and code leveraging experience and study that I have done.  I’ll provide further details here in the coming weeks with some links.  I’ve not decided as to whether or not I will publish actual sales data or not yet. The mISV isn’t technically the eBay stuff.  That’s purely for income generation in the shorter term.  However beyond that it is my intention to be relatively transparent and frank about the process.  It’s also my hope that this blog will assist me in staying focussed.

More Soon….