In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting some pestering from Manoj over my business and how to develop it. The conversation last week took it a step further: stop trying to do everything within Vagueware and instead concentrate on coming up with ideas and then - critically - finding the team to make the ideas happen. I might be great at ideas, and able to hold my own as a developer and somebody able to build a cashflow model, but I can’t do marketing to save my life. Nor can I handle PR, design, or think of everything else that needs to be thought of.

Of course, this took the usual pattern of my conversations with Manoj: we started with “Manoj, you’re such a doofus”, and ended with me thinking about it and conceding he might have a point.

Right now, I have so many ideas to work on they just sit here. They do nothing whilst on my desk. That was why I built vagueware originally - push the ideas out there, somebody, somewhere is bound to get on with them. I left myself with just a few ideas to work on:

• My own consultancy: helping businesses develop software solutions. Two years ago that took the form of offering services as a Rails developer and has evolved to the point that next year it will take the form of managing a range of developers and being the bridge between the business World and the geek World
• The Idea Bank: allow people to post ideas, and build a business around encouraging innovation
• Kagtum: A new way of thinking about news, relevant content and what people need to know about the World around them
• Fluxish: An idea I’ve not blogged about, but ultimately comes to down to very scalable “it just works” web application hosting that takes the pain away from growing an online business

Guess what? That’s still too many ideas. I figured with 400+ ideas, taking just 1% of them for myself and shoving the other 99% “out there”, the 1% would become manageable. That hasn’t happened and it means whilst the consultancy is doing “OK” it’s not doing “great” and all the other ideas are suffering from neglect.

I’ve made a decision then. I’m now reducing the number of projects I work on: my day job is now the consultancy and the idea bank.

Except I still want to make Kagtum happen, and I still want to make Fluxish happen, and there are four or five ideas outside of those I’d like to see come to life in the next 12 months.

How am I going to do this? Well, I’m going to start putting teams together who want to take equity in an idea and with a mixture of design, developer, PR and other skills, we’re all going to own a share in a business that we get to the point of being of interest to external funding - or even better, making money on its own two feet - with a view to exit.

So, if you think this sounds like something you want to work on (particularly if you’re interested in Kagtum or Fluxish), or you have skills outside of development such as PR and marketing, and you think you could give up 5-10 hours/week for a business you’d have equity in, you might want to get in touch with me. If you’re not convinced, you need some idea as to what is involved and want me to blog some more, leave a message in the comments.