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Our thoughts on making great software
Do you want to create a must-have software application, a compelling new business model, and the next Internet darling? (I sure do!) Then Daniel Tunkelang offers some sage advice: when in doubt, make it public and permanent. He cites Blogger, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as examples of previously private communication brought into the public sphere.
The lesson is that while security features remove objections in the customer’s mind, they don’t help you sell the product.
Dharmesh Shah gave a presentation at the Business of Software conference called Everything I Know About Startups. He posted a video of it to his blog, OnStartups. If you’re in the software industry or work with startup companies, you should watch it. The video lasts about an hour, but the insights Dharmesh gives you will last much longer.
Dharmesh lists the ten key points from his presentation — I’ve copied them below — but you need to hear his explanation to understand the rationale behind each.
1. Your idea can suck. Just get started.
2. You can be in the middle of nowhere and still build a great business.
3. Not having cash breeds good behavior. It’s helpful to have constratints.
4. In defense of the modest outcome: You don’t HAVE to build the next Facebook. Modest liquidity events are highly under-rated.
5. “I’m a complete introvert. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just don’t like beind around them a whole lot.”
6. Something’s changed here. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get your message out there.
7. The real issue with VC is not the cost of capital (which is high), but how hard it is to actually raise it.
8. You have to go through the 12 flaming hoops of venture capital.
9. All the time you should’ve been spending solving your customer’s problem, you use to start to solve the VC’s problem.
10. Write a blog, not a business plan.
We’ll be giving all of these points deep thought over the coming months.
Paul Graham posted a Fundraising Survival Guide for start ups to his website. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
Tick tock tick tock
When we started Infovark, we had roughly enough money to get through the first year. We did a fairly good job of budgeting, all things considered. We’ll be able to stretch our initial round further than planned, basically because we hired a few specialists under contract rather than another full time employee. We were also pleasantly surprised at the number of high quality software development tools you can get for free or at reasonable cost. (Microsoft’s Empower for ISVs was a particular boost.)
But when you’re a startup, the clock is always ticking. I can hear it now: “Time is money is time is money….” This is the mantra of the founder. It’s what gives us sleepless nights. It leads to fear and indecision. The search for additional funding can obscure the real goal of starting the company: building something useful — and having fun while doing it.
Infovark has by far been the best work experience of my life. Not merely because the Burrow is conveniently located in my basement — though it’s nice not to fight traffic — but because I’ve finally gotten a chance to create a product from scratch. I’ve never had the chance to do that before, and I’ve been learning a lot in the process. (That’s entrepreneur shorthand for making more mistakes faster than ever before.)
I’m really excited about this stage of the project. We’ve gotten an initial round of feedback from our alpha testers, and we’re mapping out the plan to get us to beta. But I can also hear the clock ticking…
That means at some stage — probably sooner than we’d like — we’ll have to leave the Burrow in search of funding. It’s a scary prospect for introverted software engineers. We’ll have to explain what we’re building, why we’re building it, and why you ought to invest in it. That means we’ll have to define why people will want to buy it and how much it will cost for them to get a copy. These are yet more things to add to our long, growing list of things that aren’t writing code. Except that getting funding is far from trivial, as Paul Graham points out. It’s a matter of survival.
One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.
I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).
I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)
The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?
When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.
Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.
Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.
(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)
We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!
We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx – it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.
Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” – a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.
My favourite quote from Sean – “Wikis don’t work in theory – they only work in practice”
Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year. They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it – often guessed at about 1-3%) – but they are still working with the early adopters – intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.
“A culture problem – not a technology problem”
Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure – it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.
” But – I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”
Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )
All in all, this was a great session – intellipedia seems set to be a great success.