Status report, 27 Dec 2007
Things are steaming along pretty nicely.
Marketing
After listening to a podcast feature Greg Gianforte at a MySQL conference, I realised that I should be putting effort into marketing now rather than after my product was ready. It seems somewhat obvious now, but I was getting excited about B*-trees and block allocation algorithms without realising that I should do more to establish demand ahead of time.
The filesystem has a marketing name, a website, and is being filled with content. I’m really excited about the idea, actually. It’s a new area of research; I get to build something that I believe in; it hasn’t been done before; there are lots of good monetization options. It is a big product, and so I’m rapidly making my ’six products in one year’ slogan irrelevant. I’m not too bothered. I have some real passion for this idea, and I think that’ll be more important in the long run.
Filling in the website makes me think about what features I intend to support - it’s like a simple spec. And it makes me more excited about what I’m going to build.
I have done a little bit of coding - mostly exploratory stuff with FUSE. It all seems to be making sense. I’ve done a bit of kernel work before, so there’s nothing too scary there.
I haven’t started doing any marketing for the file synchronizer. This is partly because I’m not thinking about it so much with the filesystem. This is a trap that I frequently fall into - I work on something while I’m passionate about it, then forget about it before completion. I do have a good body of code there, however, so I should start working on that at some point.
The big lesson that I’m learning right now is that there is an awful lot of work to be done. I can’t just sprint to a release. It’s going to take consistent effort over a period of months to get these things out the door, and probably more effort to get people to actually use them (let alone buy something!) I need to just be calm and patient and keep putting in consistent effort.
AdWords
I’ve set up a bunch of AdWords ads for the filesystem. They’ll go active when I have enough website content to justify it. They’re always a good way to generate more ideas - I had suspected that Windows users might be interested in something like this, but was interested to learn that a lot of people have been searching for ways to get ZFS to run on Windows. This is encouraging to me - it’s a big market opening. Getting ZFS running on Linux is a bit dodgy right now, and Windows is not even under consideration. Along with the general confusion and problems running RAID arrays under Windows, there’s big demand for highly reliable storage on commodity Windows machines.
Office space
I’ve got some office space. Hurrah! It gets me out of the house and the others I’m sharing it with are great fun. I don’t think I’d go back to working from my bedroom for any length of time. There’s some productivity cost in terms of distractions, but there’s big benefits to my moods and motivation which more than makes up for it.
I am still experiencing difficulty concentrating after about six hours of solid work and finding that it’s somewhat diet-related. Along with a recent Slashdot article on nootropics, I’m going to have to investigate dietary supplements more. Now that I’m actually interested in working longer hours, it may be useful.
Day job
The day job is still there, I guess, but on holidays. I haven’t done much work for them for a while. I have had to start transferring money from my investment accounts, which is a bit scary. But it’s early days yet. I always have the option of seeking out more paying work; I just don’t need to right now.