Micro-ISV "opportunities": pick one for life

I have waited for this one: The new Google desktop application (via Dennis ). I used to dislike the web user interface so much that I'd rather not go in there to check stats or optimize ads at all! Such a "mission-critical" tool (for Google just as crucial as for their advertisers) certainly should provide an enjoyable experience (in software, if a tool performs according to expectations and behaves responsively, that already counts as an enjoyable experience). The web interface, while doing its core job satisfactorily, in my opinion didn't really deliver that.

Dennis Gurock writes:

It would be nice if MSN had a similar tool. It would be even better if you could synchronize ads and keywords between MSN and Google. Or if you had a single desktop application to manage all the different systems — complete with reports and statistics. Is this a Micro-ISV opportunity?

Sounds like a good one. I believe there are a few distinctive common patterns that lead to a Micro-ISV opportunity. If I have missed some, let me know:

• Pet project productization. A software developer identifies a software idea and thinking, "This could be fun!", starts a personal pet project around the idea. Later on s/he realizes that by "just putting in a day or two more", this could become a viable, marketable product. Still later, the one day or more turn out to be one month or more additional (mostly non-programming) work: polishing and furnishing, additional features to attract customers (that weren't required by the creator of the project initially), website creation, setting up payment processing, creating separate limited trial versions, including some kind of licence protection mechanism, you name it. This was the approach taken for my (mildly) "successful" first product, , and for my (rather) "failed" second product, .
• Consulting project productization. Producing custom software tailored to suit the requirements of consulting clients can lead to the realization of a product opportunity, once certain commonalities and overlapping feature needs are identified. Most products targeted at businesses, organizations and enterprises have probably evolved this way, as well as some authoring and developer tools, I assume, although the "personal pet factor" could well be higher here.  For the sake of simplicity, wether the work started out as a consulting project for a client or as an in-house project for an employer does not matter here; I think the commonalities are sufficient to afford a single category.
  
• Fix and improve. Working with some product or service, a slowly evolving and often repeating feeling along the lines of "how annoying, I could do this better, especially part X I would do completely differently" may yield a new Micro-ISV taking a new competing product or service to market. This can range from extreme cases (duplicating the entire product or service and including a few fixes) to extending (original product or service was too narrow) or narrowing (original product or service was too niche). Hint: try to avoid producing that feeling in your customers and you may avoid some future competition. ;)
• Deliberately seeking out a product idea. Some people are so fascinated by the Micro-ISV "career path" that they decide to pursue it first, then go looking for product ideas, sometimes even in an industry they have yet to learn about.

If you are serious about starting a Micro-ISV, what I would like to pass along as advice is a question I want you to ask yourself: would you mind spending the next one or two decades, or even the rest of your life, working on your solution / product / service?

Hell, no way!, I hear you answer and rightly so: who wants to spend the majority of the rest of their lives with just one activity, any activity? After all, part of what makes life exciting are new opportunities, changing interests, evolving opportunities and having fun along the way. Change is a fact of life, one that feels sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless one that is a major reason for most of the actions and choices we make.

Now, what matters is not whether you would actually enjoy doing what you set out to do for the rest of your life, but your comfortability with the imaginative prospect. It can be helpful assessing whether, how well and how patiently (and consequently: how successfully) you will:

• go the extra mile that will be required before any milestone, no matter how small
• deal with challenges such as unsatisfied customers or customers failing to materialize, competitors, copy-cats, pirates and freeloaders
• continue to nurture and evolve your product, gearing it ever closer towards the needs of your customers
• and more or less enjoy the process

So here is my advice, maybe somewhat radical in Micro-ISV terms: when assessing potential areas of business to pursue, pick the one you would do for life. I'm not suggesting you should then go ahead and do it for fourty years to come, even ignoring the fact that such an opportunity seems unlikely. I'm merely saying that this will affect the outcome. Pick the one where you want to become a leading player. I'm not saying this is going to happen, or this should be your only goal and yardstick with which to measure whether you "succeeded" or "failed". I'm merely suggesting that this a good indicator for how enthusiastic you really are about the opportunity, deep down, and that this, again, will affect the outcome of your pursuit.

Case in point: . I never had any intention of entering the casual games software industry. While there were few competitors when I launched, this quickly changed within two to three months, given the many players in that market. Once launched, I was always quite hesitant to keep working on that product. I have done so for quite a while, up to a fairly mature point when I "freezed" the product. I'm now merely taking orders, issuing license keys and answering the odd support request. No marketing, no new versions (apart from the odd hotfix). Business has declined as a consequence that was predictable and that I have put up with, being the cost of developing my forthcoming product. It has more than paid for the up-front time investment, which is good. But had I asked the above questions beforehand, I wouldn't have done it, or rather I would not do something where the answer is "no" again. My main objective was to build, not a piece of software but a product, market it and sell it, and by that measure my experiment was successful indeed. (So maybe one "non-ultimate" project to get started with is OK for Micro-ISVs after all. ;)

However, you can quickly get lost in such projects and waste your energy and resources that would be better spent (better meaning more enjoyably and more lucratively) on "ultimate" projects: such where the answer to the above questions would be "yes".

My upcoming product is a lot more closer on the "ultimacy" scale, and it will have to be, for I have decided to go Micro-ISV for real.