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Yesterday was an administration day at infovark. I spent the whole day not writing code.
When you start your own software company, you suddenly discover the amount of time you can spend on things other than making software. Before Gordon and I made the leap, we created a high-level schedule to take us to our first release. If you count effort expended against the plan, we’re tracking well. If you measure by milestone dates, we’re far behind. And it’s all due to things other than writing code.
We drastically underestimated the amount of time taken up by finance, legal, marketing, administration and human resources. It’s an understandable mistake. At our previous jobs, we had people to look after these things for us. Now we’re in charge of them as well as heading up our R&D efforts.
For other software entrepreneurs, here’s a short list of things that aren’t code:
All of these things are important, of course. You wouldn’t have a company without them. Yet the developer in you desperately wants to be left alone to “get some work done.” It requires an attitude adjustment. As an ISV, it’s all part of your work now.
Before we officially launched infovark, Gordon and I read Eric Sink on the Business of Software. It’s required reading for all developers working in an ISV or thinking about starting one. You can also check out his blog. It’s a great place to start learning about all those important things that aren’t code.
And now back to the fun stuff.
For most people, the use of the nominative plural pronoun (‘we’) tends to refer to themselves and to the other significant people who happen to be sharing their lives.
If you work for a company, or any kind of collaborative venture where there are multiple people working towards a similar goal, you’ll find that you use the word ‘we’ an awful lot. For example ‘We need to refactor that code, and we should probably add some comments’ or ‘We need to get our TPS reports done by Monday’.
I think that the use of the word ‘We’ is one of the nicest things about being at work. That one little word indicates collaboration is occurring. It shows that you accept some joint responsibility for your success (or failure), and it reminds you that you’re all in this together. Whenever you start a new job, or a new project, the first few times you say it, you notice that you just said it. It’s a thing, at first. Then it quickly becomes part of the corporate vernacular, and you aren’t as aware of it anymore.
Personally, in the last five years, most of the time I said ‘We’, I was referring to TOWER Software. TOWER make a well regarded ECM suite called TRIM Context, which is designed for the government and highly regulated markets. After 5 years, I decided that I was brave/crazy enough to try something on my own, and was fortunate to find a kindred spirit in my TOWER Colleague, Dean.
And so for both of us, Infovark is a new kind of ‘We’. We‘re a small startup based in Northern Virginia, who have a vision for changing the way people work together.
Anytime somebody says ‘We’, we want Infovark to be there supporting them. To make it easier to share information. To help them make decisions. To help them get to know each other. And to take away the burden of complex, enterprise software that is hard to use and understand.
It’s an ambitious goal, but it’s one that we’re utterly committed to.
And so, it starts! We hope you’ll stick with us, and share the journey.