Starting Your Software Business With $0

by Roger Willcocks 11/15/2008 6:42:00 PM

Yes.  You can do it.  And since I like the idea of showing how, and someone else though it would be interesting, I'll go through it.

This will take me a few posts to go through, from locating an apropriate website, identifying a product, producing the product, and putting it up for sale.

Points to note:

  • This is not hugely cost effective, you'll be giving away ~25-30% of your revenue to someone else in exchange for not doing payment processing
  • I don't recommend this for long term use, but it works well for getting some cashflow up front.

You WILL need:

  • A PayPal account (if you want to get the money quickly)
  • The ability to program, or someone who will do the work in exchange for a profit share.

Things you need to do:

  • Locate a website that acts as a "marketplace" and processes the payments for you
  • Research the products that sell well
  • Create a product specification
  • Create the product (or get it created)
  • Package it
  • Set it up on the website
  • Write sales copy for it

 

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Product Ideas | Products

define:microISV

by Roger Willcocks 11/2/2008 7:00:00 AM

I typed that into Google, and I got nothing back.

Which is odd.  Google is usually pretty good at defining things.

Anyway, here is a good working definition of a microISV (borrowed from Wikipedia):

A Micro-ISV (abbr. mISV or μISV), a term coined by Eric Sink, is an independent software vendor with just one software developer. In such an environment the company owner develops software, manages sales and does public relations.

The definition is commonly accepted to be slightly wider than that.  Often encompassing up to 10 people, but most often one or two. An "Independent Software Vendor" by the way, is a company that sells software, but doesn't quite reach the scale of Microsoft or Oracle.

What this means is that one person can basically do everything required to run that business.  And that comes down to about 10% research, 5% design, 10% development, 10% support, and 65% marketing and promotion.

In fact, you can even farm out the development and support parts (though I recommend keeping that) if you are not a programmer.  The real keys are:

  1. Finding out what people want (no technical skills required)
  2. Designing something give it to them (some logical/planning skills required)
  3. Getting it somehow
  4. Marketing it (marketing skills)

Notice that programming skills don't actually appear there.  The only place those are needed are to create software (and that's just one of the ways of getting it), and it would help for designing it, but is not critical.

So, now you have the technical term for how I spend my evenings.

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