#43/111: Micro ISV

What is it about?

Just for the clarity, a Micro ISV is a small software vendor. Bob Walsh writes about the complete process from finding the idea, to founding a company, to actually selling the software.

Key points?

Search for pain points: Ask people in a industry that interested you, how you can help them. In general, you will find a lot of problems that arise but haven’t be solved yet.

Building your product is easier than selling it: Bob Walsh interviewed a lot of people in this book and most people agreed with this statement. If you are a professional, you know how to solve problems in your area but often founders underestimate the part of marketing and sales.

Niche, Niche, Niche: One interesting observation was that most people built products for the mass market. Today, nearly none of them still exists. The others chose a niche and are still running.  Why? If your market is too big, big players becoming your competitors. If you market is small, all your competition is small.

Conclusion

This book was written in 2005 and is a bit outdated. It doesn’t really cover internet marketing besides writing a blog and Google Ads and it’s heavily focused on Windows development. However, the interviews were interesting and stimulating.

Freedom and Non-conformance

Freedom By 7Bart

I’ve received Hackers and Painters two days ago. It’s a collection of some essays by Paul Graham. One chapter named “Good Bad Attitude” deals with attitude of hackers (both destructive and constructive).
In general the term “hacker” it mutilated by media, now referring to a 15 year of boy who’s destroying websites. In the open software movement or generally spoken in software development a hacker is a great programmer.
This essay is full of great observations. I’ll begin with the disobedience.

“Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.” — Paul Graham

The main idea behind this quote is that a hacker will question some main ideas or concepts. “He will never grow up. He’s a rebelling teenager with 38.” Sure, like Descartes, Max Planck or Copernicus. Each of them questioned an existing idea or concept. This is the path to innovation. Innovation alters the market, humans and science.

It’s an opportunity for startups. They don’t have so much bureaucracy and tightened hierarchy. There are enough examples: Google, Apple, Microsoft, IKEA or Starbucks.
They’ve questioned current concepts and innovated them with a new search engine algorithm, an new way for selling furniture or an new feeling buying coffee.