Unemployed? Why Not Start a Software Company?

R.S.D. asks: "I see all these Ask Slashdot articles about unemployment these days. Why don't a few of you guys get together and start a software company? Out there in the world, there is still a lot of software that needs to be written, and people are still pumping lots of money into software (and biotech). In fact, the software sector is still described as the enduring leader in raising venture capital, though apparently in Silicon Valley more money is going out of the maturing software industry and into things that are still high-tech like biopharm and nano. Is anyone else trying this? If so, how's it going? If not, why not?" This is easier suggested, than implemented. For those who have gone this route, what suggestions would you give to those who may follow?

"Every time I see a group of 5-10 self-described 'great but unlucky' IT workers looking for a job, and how their previous company had to lay them off because their former employer had this 'stupid idea' it was to move all the jobs to Elbonia, I have to ask myself -- why don't these guys get together and start a software company. If you don't make these 'mistakes' of outsourcing development to Elbonia, couldn't you compete pretty well?

Best of all if you ever did need to grow, in this job market, you can get highly educated and experience software engineers even more inexpensively than China or India -- I've heard some internships are unpayed these days.:-)

Yes, I am taking my own advice, and trying this, even though I was not unemployed."

Comments

I did this.

[anaphora]

I started this when I was 16. I designed programs to teach kids arithmetic. Now I'm 18, have a steady job that brings me about $10/day for all of the work of listing my programs on eBay, and every once in a while, I'll get lucky and a school will want to purchase 50 or 100 copies of my program on floppies for their computers. The programs took about 3 days to write, and they were the best 3 days of my life.

I have tried multiple times

[Tablizer]

....and failed. It is not easy. You can't just throw clever programming at the problem and get money out the other end. For one, it takes a hell of a lot of marketing knowhow, something that most geeks should have known they were crappy at when the prettiest girls went to the fast-talking football players. There is much more to making a company than clever tech. Tech ability is becoming a cheap commodity. That is life in the new mellenium. The sun is setting on us geeks and there are fewer and fewer escapes.