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Eric Sink on Starting Your Own Software Company
prostoalex writes "The topic of starting your own software company was recently brought up on Ask Slashdot as a way to fight current employment trends. Eric Sink from SourceGear, who shared his software company-building experience before has written a new article published on MSDN. Getting started with your own software company suggests several simple steps to evaluate your abilities, count your estimated expenses and then start the software company, if the idea still seems feasible."
...on starting a company is right here.
Lots of similar ideas there, including a few rants against VCs and incubators.
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Ahhh, finally step 2...
1) Start small software company with flagship product
2) Get bought out my Microsoft
3) Profit!
I know tht;s a bit flippant .... but if you use a PO Box for your company's registration and correspondance and no one ever is going to come to your house you're not going to piss anyone off .... and they probably wont care
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What, you want advise from OSDN?
The Association of Shareware Professionals has some great resources for writing, marketing, and selling software for the author on a tight (read almost no) budget. While some companies probably get VC help, I think this a great start for research if you are interested in trying out some capitalism with your software. There is a lot of competition due to the low barrier of entry, but a motivated individual with talent could end up quitting their day job. WinZip is a good example of a success.
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just past the 1 year marker, having started my own business. he forgot the one thing that i think is the most important. make contacts before you take the leap. sadly, who you know is more important that what you know. if it weren't for the contacts i've made in advance of starting my business, i wouldn't have lasted two months.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php
It's a bit out of date (we started in '89), but even so, we were told it was too late to get into the software startup game. We had no business plan. Yet we managed to beat our Microsoft competition (MS Works), with no venture capital, in fact without even incorporating... of course, getting bought by Claris helped. But I think keeping everything ultra-low overhead was essential - *all* of our time was spent designing and developing, and none on coming up with a business plan, a "failure plan", etc., as described on the MSDN article. YMMV...
There are still plenty of great ideas out there, waiting to see the light of day.
Borrow from friends and family.
Have a working spouse.
Borrow from your credit cards."
Obtain money from a potentially major customer
This one is often overlooked. If a company has a problem they need solving and is willing to fund some of your development effort to solve it, this is a golden opportunity. Depending upon what problem you are solving, the company may not be interested either in owning any of the IP you create or supporting the product if/when it takes off.
This is how the company I'm with now started and their sales are $500MUSD per year. It all started from a $500K investment from a major industry leader, who remains the company's biggest and most valued customer.
I posted this a little late when this was discussed a couple of days ago, so here it is again so that it can hopefully help out some people.
:)
;) My research led me to these guys who created a corporation for us in Delaware for about $100. We also bought a corporate kit from them (for ~$50) which included a corporate seal and all the necessary legal documents. On a side note, a lot of the informati
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.
Amen. This gets right to the heart of what most people here don't seem to realize, much less mention. Starting a software company requires great coding AND marketing skills, not to mention a good sense of what would even be a good product to make. I'm speaking from experience here; I've succeeded in my own startup.
Most geeks either don't have what it takes or aren't willing to put forth the effort required to make a software company succesful. Aside from the coding, there's the packaging and the selling. After the packaging and the selling, there's the support and maintenance. And by maintenance, I don't just mean maintenance regarding your product...but your company. Because once you get to the point where you've got a nicely packaged product that needs to be supported and maintained (assuming you've done it right), you've also got a nice little beast on your hands called a corporation.
Now I imagine that most of this stuff would be a breeze for the average slashdotter, except for the part about packaging and selling (i.e. marketing). This is the most difficult area for geeks to master. The head of the evil empire is where he is today because of his mastery in this area. But Bill Gates isn't the only geeks with those skills, so if you want to succeed, find yourself a partner with (very important) BOTH marketing AND technical skills. Let him do all the talking. Let him handle user iterface, software packaging (installers, icons, etc...) and you can concentrate completely on coding while he puts a pretty face on it and handles the customers.
Of course, this is all easier said than done. So I'll tell you what I've done and how I've succeeded. Hopefully this information will help you succeed as well
A couple of years ago I was running out of contract work and I didn't want to go get a "regular" job because I don't like being a cog in the man's machine. So I decided to start looking for opportunities.
Step 1: Look for an opportunity
I figured it would be easier to start in a niche market with little competition. I also knew that small businesses are a ripe market for IT services. It just so happened that one of the companies I was doing part time consulting for was a small business in a niche market. The owner of this business had excellent contacts in his industry as well; I don't mention the industry because I don't want to invite competition
I knew I possessed the marketing and people skills necessary, but I didn't quite have some of the coding skills to pull it all off. So I talked to a friend who is a top notch coder working for a large web hosting company who was interested in starting a business. I told him about my contact in this small, nich market and about the need for certain types of software. We both had similar outlooks on life and our personalities were a good match for a business partnership, so we agreed to start a company.
Step 2: Incorporate
I then did a little bit of research to learn how to actually create a company. Whichever of you is the smartest one should handle this. I just happen to have a 156 IQ, so it was a breeze.