The Adventure Begins

Is it better to create your own product? Or someone else's?

For 10 years at our little software shop, we've always answered that question as the latter. We're good at delivering results, and our modest customer base has appreciated our work enough to keep us busy full time creating the software they need.

We've developed software under contract, for

• a Fortune 500 shipping company
• one of the largest defense contractors in the world
• a small startup
• a Fortune 500 retailer
• others...

But never for our own retail customers, and never on our own software product.

That all changes, this year - today even. Today, the very same programmer that writes this blog begins work full time on a series of software products that we will sell retail. This seems like an almost bizarre move, given the nature of the software market and our total lack of experience as a retail provider.

What Products will we Create and Sell?

If you read Blue Ocean Strategy, you'd laugh that our product ideas are so Blue Ocean they are laughable. We're going to start with our own JournalBetter product, a way for writers and thinkers to enjoy their craft. This is a ridiculously small market, but we have some ideas for making it fun, and we're excited about that.

After that, maybe in 2011 or 2014, we'd like to expand into a product for helping thinkers, designers, and decision makers take their ideas to the next level. Haha, pretty obscure market, right? We should be able to sell at least 6 units a year? Silly or not, we've been working on this for years now, and once again, we're pretty excited about it. We even think we can create a runaway best seller, as deluded as that may seem. After all, deep thinking is such a popular sport, eh?

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Hmm. Let's do a quick inventory.

• No experience in retail software
• Microscopic market served well by free software.
• No marketing budget.
• No product to sell yet.

Hecky darns, looks like a sure thing, to me!

My Own Role:

As the main guy in our little organization, I'll be doing most of the development work alone until we can begin generating enough revenue from retail sales to support a bit of expansion. It's a labor of love, and I'm glad to be doing it full time for a few years.

It will be interesting to see if I can get the hang of this new role fast enough to make it commercially succesful. Wish us all luck!