Six Software Products in One Year

I haven’t actually done any work on these projects for a week or two, and I’m going to fall back on the old excuse: I’m too busy at work. The deal is that I finish a feature and then I can go on holiday. I desperately need a holiday. So I’m working hard on the feature.

I’m planning to be in Brisbane for BarCamp in December, Melbourne for linux.conf.au in January, then hopefully New Zealand to do some mountain biking in March. There. I said it. I can’t back out now.

I’ve been thinking about the products I have in mind, their size and how I develop them into things I could actually charge money for. I doubt that I could charge for the software itself - that wasn’t really my intent to begin with. It’s more add-on services, things like online sychronization and backup, multi-user versions, reporting and so on. Hook people with the free software and get them on the extras.

So, the planner.

I’m going to preface all of my insecure rambling with “even if I sell nothing, I still have some useful software for myself, so it’s still worthwhile”. Expensive, yes, but useful.

I’m having trouble imagining how to get people to actually use the thing. Not even pay for it, just use it. I get the impression that most people are satisfied with, well, nothing. They don’t track tasks. How they get any work done is beyond me. These people are easy to spot: when you say “did you fix XYZ bug from last week?” they’ll say “I forgot”. Of course you forgot! You didn’t write it down! Aaaargh! Then I start writing down their tasks in my task tracking system or filing bugs for them in a bug tracking system in the hopes that it’ll be remembered.

Some people use a text file or Outlook/Evolution’s todo lists. Some people use bugtracking systems as their task lists. I haven’t met many people like me that use hierarchical task lists. None that I’m aware of. Moving people to any sort of task tracking is a big improvement, so text files or TaDaList might be a good step. It’s hard to justify the overhead of a hierarchical task thingy.

Phrasing the hierarchical feature in terms for the customer, I’m thinking something like “You can drill down to see detail or pull back to see the big picture - in seconds!” It’s still awkward and not terribly compelling.

What if I change the focus from task tracking to project management? After all, Microsoft Project is probably the world’s most popular hierarchical task tracker. It’s a bit clunky to use for everyday stuff, but the idea is there. And if I put in time estimation features (even Evidence Based Scheduling - sorry, Joel!) I’m halfway there.

How about a ’software workbench’ or ‘development dashboard’? A central place to monitor all of the things happening in your software project. Bugs, schedules, requirements, tasks, reminders, releases, support calls, documentation, wikis, builds, costings, blah-de-blah. I’d start by having all of those external data sources (like bugs) tie in to the existing systems, but down the track I could build new ones as well (like Trac) - although the thought of building another bug tracking system isn’t exactly appealing. I’m thinking of an Outlook-style interface with the modules listed on the left-hand side, probably implemented as plugins. I do like my rich-client interfaces, but this could make more sense as a webapp. The FogBugz sales model could work - a license gets you the code to run on your server, or we provide a hosted service for a per-month fee. I see it (perhaps naiively) as a ‘playing the numbers’ strategy - one of those modules has to be critical to someone, and that gets the sale.

But then, what happens to my humble little task planner? Relegated to a small module in an all-singing, all-dancing Broadway production. It might be something you pull up once per project so you can build a Gantt chart. It’ll be lonely, and I’ll be sad.

Or I could just let the modules be separable from the main dashboard, free to live their independent lives without the emotional baggage of the others.

Here’s what I want. Future employers, take note!

• Air conditioning.
• A couch to lie on when I’m stuck on a problem. This happens a lot, and relaxing is the best way to work through it.
• People to talk to. I’ve done the work-from-home thing. It’s OK, but it gets lonely fast.
• Lots of desk space. Three square metres is the absolute minimum. 6-9 would be ideal.
• An absolutely silent environment. No computer hum. No people talking. No cars revving or police sirens.
• My lovely LSK F6 MKII speakers and permission to run them as loud as I want. Headphones are tolerable if I must.
• Several computers, at least one of them a laptop. Probably one Linux and one Windows. An OSX machine would be ideal, too.
• Multiple large monitors. 24″ is a good starting point.
• Natural light. But I should be able to control the amount of natural and artificial light.
• Plentiful food and snacks within the workplace. If I’m in the middle of something and hungry, I don’t want to have to go outside and find something.
• Good food nearby, both cheap takeaway and nicer places for entertaining.
• Outside the office should be quiet and pleasant. No traffic or pollution.
• I should have a nice big window with a view.
• To get there, a 10-15 minute walk is ideal. Less means that I don’t have proper separation between home and work. More is annoying.
• I shouldn’t need to mention high-speed, reliable, unrestricted Internet access.
• A source of good coffee without having to go outside.
• I’d consider a Wii or XBox or something, but I’d be likely to abuse it. A good bookshelf would be nice, though.
• Ooh, and a pony.

Most of these desires are merely financial. I can buy a couch, espresso machine, have a well-stocked fridge, big monitors and so on. One advantage of working from home is that a lot of these desires are taken care of already - I have the espresso machine, couch, food and so on.
Some of the desires conflict with each other and will be a compromise. For example, it’s unlikely I can have a nice quiet area with lots of good food. Good food tends to attract people, and people are noisy. Google famously solves this by providing meals.
I use a 24″ Dell monitor at home and it’s great. I really only need one of these, plus a 19″ on the side for the secondary computers. Of course, if someone was to offer me a 30″, I wouldn’t be complaining…
There are a few options I’ve considered:

• Work from home. The big problem here is distraction and loneliness. It’s nice to separate work and relaxation instead of having them all in the one place. There’s usually no-one else around, so you have to make an extra effort to socialize. It does have the major benefits of being cheap (don’t have to pay bills twice or buy two lots of stuff), convenient (roll out of bed and flick on the computer) and relatively nice.
• Executive suite. This seems like a good compromise - a proper office, people around, hopefully a door that closes. It is expensive, though, and unlikely to be as well equipped as a home office. You could always put the money from an executive suite into your residential rent and get a really nice place to live.
• Share office. Great for socializing; not so great for getting work done. Less expensive than the executive suite.
• Work in cafes and restaurants. Probably the cheapest out-of-home option, so long as you can find a venue that’s happy to have you there for eight hours per day. You can’t have things like big monitors, though - you’re stuck with a single laptop.

I suspect that a combination of the above might work well. Right now I’m attending an office four days/week for my day job and working at home for another day or two. I get some of my socializing done at the day job and get a lot of work done when I work from home.

I suspect that a great deal of the success of web-based applications is that it’s easy to try them. All you have to do is go to the website; no installing things, no dependencies, no virus scanners, no saving files. There are very low barriers to entry; there’s very little friction.

Personally, I find most web-based applications to be absolutely awful to use. Every UI is different. There aren’t any keyboard shortcuts. I like to have control over my data, and I like to be able to work offline.

For most people, these aren’t major problems. Witness the almost complete domination of webmail over traditional desktop email programs. Given that an ‘ordinary user’ doesn’t have a very reliable computer or backups, keeping all of your email online overseas is probably not a big problem. They’re going online to read email anyway, so it might as well live online.

Imagine, for a moment, the last time you installed some software on your computer. The last installation I did on Windows was the Symbian SDK. I had to choose between a number of download options, download a few hundred megabytes of files, do the installation, consult Google to find out why it wouldn’t work after being installed, go and download some dependencies, install them, blah blah blah blee blee blah blah.

The last installation I did on Linux was FlightGear, a flight simulator. I fired up aptitude, selected the flightgear package and told it to install. There was still a long wait for the download (also a few hundred megabytes) but all of the dependencies and installation happened automatically. The actual time I spent performing the installation was quite small; I just went on with other tasks while it happened. This is a much better situation.

The next best thing for Windows is usually to download a zip file which uncompresses and runs from the folder - it doesn’t have an install program. These programs also run nicely off thumb drives if you’re into that. I like these as a developer - writing and testing install programs is a royal pain in the behind.

Better still would be to just download an executable and run that. Fog Creek Copilot does this for their user agent. It even deletes itself when it’s done, which is extremely considerate. If you’ve got a program with lots of files - like the Python apps I’m planning to distribute - you could have it extract to a temporary directory and execute from there.

Can a desktop app get any easier? An even easier situation might be to click a link on a website and have the program fire up on your desktop. Java Web Start has the right idea, but the implementation is sloppy. The idea is that you click the magic JWS button on a website and the program is downloaded without your knowledge and executed on your computer. Great. You do a caching scheme so you don’t have to download repeatedly; you can set up a Start/GNOME/K/whatever menu item so people can come back later.

Thinking about this last option against a web application, the web application still seems smoother. I think it’s the download time. There’s also the scary “do you want to download this executable” box which most people see but click through anyway. The webapp still feels like it has less friction. The desktop app has a large ’speed bump’ where you have to wait for a download, and during that you start thinking about other things or mentally task switch. You have to think about where you’re going to store the file and do I have to uncompress it and does it have any viruses and how am I going to arrange the windows. The web app is just another tab, and even if I task switch away, it’s just there waiting. Web apps are fairly predictable, even if they are a bit boring at times.

I started playing with the Symbian SDK and Carbide (the IDE) today. Project Two is probably going to be a working time tracker for Symbian. Again, it’s something that I’d use a lot myself. I have a working time tracker already, but it’s very buggy and doesn’t have a lot in the way of features. I want things like automated reporting and multiple clients/projects.

Nokia have done a damn good job with their dev tools. They’re making them easy to get, they’re very well documented and there’s a lot of effort put towards creating a community of developers. Compare with Apple and the iPhone where they are actively discouraging third-party development and people are desperate to develop for the thing anyway. Nokia are doing a great job here and I have to applaud them for it.

I skimmed through one of the tutorials in the Carbide documentation; it’s a basic ‘Hello World’ application. The tutorial takes you through setting up the application, building, running in an emulator and running on the device. The emulator is superb; it looks and acts like an S60v3 phone. It hooks into the Windows TCP/IP stack so you can test networked applications. You can rotate and resize the screen to test the different combinations of physical displays. You can hook it up to a nice IDE-based debugger if you need to get down and dirty with the code. All great stuff.

You need to pay for the Developer edition of Carbide if you want to do on-device debugging. There’s a free trial. Carbide is Eclipse-based, but I didn’t even realise that I was using a Java application until I started digging around the libraries and discovered that there were Java-style namespaces. There’s an Express edition of Carbide, and it’s fine to use that for commercial development.

There are a few little problems. Something in the build configuration doesn’t handle spaces in paths, so you have to create your project out of the usual Documents and Settings hierarchy. The Symbian and Carbide files are swimming with case-sensitivity issues, but that’s not a problem if you’re on NTFS. Linux support does seem to be fairly good, though.

When it comes time to generate an SIS file so you can install on the phone, the build fails (missing HelloWorld_reg.rsc, but I can see it just fine). I fixed this by creating a new build configuration that duplicated the default Debug settings. I’m not sure why this made a difference.

Things change dramatically once you retire. First, your net worth on a salary:

Then, when you own a royalty-generating business:

In reality the scale is everything, but the point remains. With the business, you keep earning money even in retirement. On the salary, you’ve just jumped out of the plane - you need to have enough cash to support yourself until you die.

If you’re thinking about this, I strongly recommend making a spreadsheet so that you can stick in your own figures (expected investment return, salary growth, retirement year, etc) and see just how your financial situation will look in various points of your life. You’ll make horrible assumptions, but you’ll learn a lot.

Click here to download the spreadsheet I used. It’s set up to make the graphs look pretty rather than realistic, but the basic idea is sound. Put your own numbers in and see what happens.

In deciding whether to concentrate on full-time work or business-building, I think a lot about the different characteristics of the income received.

Full-time work is typically a constant $N/year. You (hopefully) receive a payrise each year. I’m going to assume 5%/year is a sustainable increase over the course of a lifetime. You put the difference between your income and expenses into investments (equity), which I’m going to assume earn 7%/year. Your net worth over time will look something like this:

Business-building - specifically, software, music, writing or other royalty-based media production - has different characteristics. In year 1, you are going to have fairly low income. You’ll do some piece of work and it will earn income on its own. This is passive income at this point - you don’t need to do any additional work to maintain that income. Then, in year 2, you’re free to do another piece of work - adding to your passive income. Lather, rinse, repeat. Your net worth will look more like this:

The question for any rational person is over the course of my lifetime, which is going to give me a higher net worth? And that’s a difficult question to answer early on. You’ve got steady but rapid growth versus exponential growth - but that growth factor is unpredictable.

This is the sort of bank balance that a startup company might see as well. There are two critical measures to take off this graph: how far into the red does the company go, and is that growth rate sufficient to make it a worthwhile investment? Many startups never even hit positive growth and will just run out of cash. Someone said that starting a startup was like jumping out of a plane; the ground seems like a long way off, but you’re falling very fast as well, and the question is whether or not you can pull out of the fall in time.

In the same way, my savings are my investment. If I run out of cash, I have to stop. I need to build income before I run out of savings. I don’t particularly want to risk all of my savings on this one venture, which is why I’ve set a one year time limit. If I’m still plummetting towards bankruptcy at the end of the year, I need to reconsider what I’m doing and if it’ll be effective. (Realistically, I’ll be watching this all of the time. One year is the big yay-or-nay decision, though).

If you need to borrow to get capital investment, this is going to make your profitability a whole lot tougher. You need to match your loan rate just to break even, as I found while playing with the spreadsheet model I used for the above graphs. Just as compounding looks like a lovely exponential growth curve, it can drag you into a horrible pit of debt very quickly.

Individual preferences are obviously going to play a big part in this decision as well. If you like to live close to your means and enjoy your money, you’re going to want the ongoing income. If you have dependents or medical bills, you need the constant income. I’m have no dependents and am happy to live a fairly lean existence, so I can choose to take this risk.

An interesting point that I read about today was that most micro-ISVs can’t keep building income forever. The income is not truly passive. Support is a big time sink, and the amount of support increases with the number of users. If you’re earning enough you can hire more people to take over this load - but this is the sort of problem that I’d like to have. If I get there, I won’t be complaining.

Playing with the spreadsheet model is highly educational: using the assumption that salary grows at 5% means that your income under a business also has to grow at at least 5% for it to be worthwhile. If you’re increasing your income by a constant amount each year, this is going to be easy to beat in the beginning and rapidly become impossible.

But, wait - there’s more! Part Two will discuss the two strategies once you retire.

In the short term, paid work is vastly more profitable. Even though I work as a contractor, not a salaried employee, paid work is far more predictable, reliable and profitable in the short term.

This raises the question: if my goal is to earn passive income, I have two major options. I could work and earn $N/year plus 0.07 x $N/year in passive income after that (ignoring compounding and expenses). Or I could build this business and start from zero income and slowly build it up - but it’s all ‘passive’ income.

There are almost no sources of income that are truly passive. Even leaving cash in a bank account requires some paperwork and monitoring. It’s a very small amount of work, but it is finite. Another way to look at this might be to compare hourly rates. Increasing the hourly rate is obviously good - you earn more money for the same work, or earn the same money for less work. So ‘passive income’ streams are essentially trying to build income streams that require very little work for a large income - they have a very good $/hour rate. A ten-year property or index fund investment might be worth tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This ignores the fact that you’re very limited in the number of hours that you can do, but it doesn’t matter so much - even if the number of hours is limited, it’s still worthwhile to take them and spend the rest of your time on the most profitable work available.

So by starting this company, I’m acknowledging that my initial per-hour rate is going to be terrible. I’ll be losing small amounts of cash in the beginning, in fact - as cheap as it is to start a software company right now, I’ve spent about USD$20 on this domain name and that puts me into the red. The idea is that over a longer time period I won’t have to put in so much effort to maintain the same income level, and so my effective per-hour rate will rise above that which I could get by working a standard job.

Product One is a hierarchical todo list. I can say this with confidence now because it’s almost ready for an initial release without starting ‘the year’. I needed a task tracker that would run on Linux. I was using AbstractSpoon’s ToDoList for years, but it’s a Windows application and runs poorly on Linux.

I can hear it already: “but how are you going to make money off a Linux application?” Popularity is the goal, not profits. Build something that people want, and the money will follow. This is also great for cutting down the project risk: if it turns out that no-one else is interested, fine, I won’t spend a lot of time developing it. If people do like it, then they can tell me what they want to see and I can come up with a monetization plan from there.

Besides, it’s cross-platform, not just Linux. wxWidgets on Python. sqlite backend. One of the quickest things I’ve ever developed to a usable state, if I do say so myself.

There’s a lot of todo lists out there, so future development will be more focused. I’m calling this a software developer’s task planner for a few reasons. One is that a hierarchy and project management system is too complicated for most people. They don’t have that many things to track and will do just fine with Outlook’s task manager or Post-It notes on their monitor.

That won’t do it for me. The difficulty for me is stemming the tide of tasks that need to be done. I notice a bug: I write it down and continue doing what I was doing. I have an idea in the shower: I write it down. Someone makes a suggestion: I write it down. I get stuck on a task: I divide it up and write it down. Some of my lists have thousands of entries. Outlook isn’t going to cut it.

By concentrating on software developers, I gain in a few ways. I’m a developer myself, so what’s useful to me is likely to be useful to others. I can introduce more complicated concepts like hierarchies without overcomplicating the product. I can focus my marketing efforts. I can specialize the product towards the target audience. This is basic Crossing The Chasm: you pick a niche and push hard until you completely own it. ‘Software Developers’ is a pretty wide niche, admittedly, but I can always revise that.

Marketing is simultaneously my weakest point and one of the most important things for me to get right.

No-one is going to pay for anything if they don’t know it’s there. You could have a cure for cancer, but if no-one knew it existed, it wouldn’t mean anything. (Obviously, once the first person found out they’d likely tell others, but this is an extreme case of ‘product good but marketing bad’).

Conversely, you can have an average or even mediocre product with strong marketing and end up doing very well. Apple zealots get ready: I believe that a lot of Apple’s products fit into this category. They spend great amounts of money and have very effective marketing, but I must say: I find their products lacking. There are always better alternatives. The problem is finding them. And given that people are likely to go with social proof (see Influence by Cialdini) and the fact that Apple’s products are quite good, Apple do very well overall. But there are better products out there.

I’m a software engineer, not a marketeer (Musketeer? What do you call a ‘marketing person’?) I’m going to need to learn some marketing. My first little blog - mouldy.org - taught me an awful lot about online marketing, what works and what doesn’t. But this is going to need a long-term, concerted effort, not just spreading a few links around.

I can imagine a few different outcomes at the end of the year.

• I build some products, but they don’t get any interest or traffic. I’ll have to get a job and will be out a year’s earnings plus the money I spend along the way. This is the worst-case scenario, but I don’t think it’s terribly likely.
• I build some products and they get a little interest, but not enough to build up enough income to live off. This is OK with me, oddly enough. Any income is a sign that I’m doing something right. I’d still have to get a job, but I will have learnt a lot and have some passive income going. So this isn’t a bad outcome.
• I build some products and I earn enough to sustain myself. This is fine. It’s not spectacular. A few years from now, I’d like to be earning a whole lot more than I am now - but I don’t have huge expectations in that respect. More important is that I can choose where and when and how I work, even if it means I don’t earn so much. If I do need extra income, I can always get a job.
• One or more of my products is a massive hit and I become rich. Woohoo! Not terribly likely, but I’m not going to complain.
• I have poor results after the first few months, get discouraged and quit. Since the alternative is that I get a job, I don’t consider that too likely. But it is possible. Maybe a job will seem appealing after that long without income or human contact.

So I guess, the worst thing that can happen is that I lose some cash and have to get a job. I don’t particularly like jobs, but it’s not the end of the world.

Chances are, I’ll still have some part-time work while I’m building these products anyway. Even right now - before I officially start - I’m dividing my time between a (nominally) full-time job and some product development. At the moment it’s about four days/week on the ‘day job’ and one or two days on product development. And that’s OK. I see regular progress, and that’s encouraging. I’d like to be making faster progress, but anything is OK.