Innovation in Software

There is an experience that all aspiring freelance and contract developers will be familiar with. Sometimes it can catch you unawares – a friend in a pub – and sometimes you can set your mind up to deal with the disappointment from the point they start the call with “I got your number from the Yellow Pages…”

The story normally goes like this:

Somebody is sat in a pub and is talking about websites they like. Suddenly it hits them:

THE BEST IDEA EVA! I will RULE!

“Those nerds at Google and Microsoft have missed a trick!”, they think, “I can see a website now that the whole World will love!”

They spend all night dissecting it, analysing it, thinking about the Porsche they’ll be able to buy this time next year off the profits. They won’t talk to their mates in the pub about it, because it’s so brilliant an idea, they’ll steal it and then they will get the rich.

They drift off to sleep that night determined that in the morning they will make this happen. The genius! Why did nobody think of it before?

Morning dawns, and whilst nursing a hangover they think over breakfast about how to make it happen. Hmmm. Problem. Websites are quite hard to do aren’t they? They involve all sorts of programming and geeks need to do things that our poor entrepreneur doesn’t know about. But hey, it won’t be expensive, they think, because they can mock up something in Word that looks like an Amazon.com page in an hour or two, and all you need is lots of those, connected together – can’t take more than a week to build something like Amazon.com, eh?

Our entrepreneur reckons with a bung of a few hundred quid to some starving programmer, he’ll be on his way. But he doesn’t know any programmers. “I know”, he says, “I’ll look up ‘web designer’ in the Yellow Pages”.

It astounds me that when somebody phones up saying “I want something a bit like Amazon.com” or “You know Tesco’s site? I want something like that for my shop” that they genuinely think you are taking the mickey by suggesting prices quoted in the thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. They think that a bespoke web application is basically like writing a book – anybody can do it, given a few uninterrupted weeks. At that point the ‘Yellow Pages crowd’ normally give up, or go and harass some poor teenage newphew who “know a bit about computers” to do it for them.

Occasionally you get slightly more educated punters rolling up. They are what I like to call “the 50k club”, so named, because no matter how daring their scheme, how adventerous and broad in scope, they think they should be able to get it built for not a penny more than £50,000.

This club’s memebership is growing, but all seem focused on copying other people’s ideas. In the last week I have had four meetings or phone calls – some with 50k club members, one for people who actually had an investment bank involved (and so they know 500k is more realistic) – where somebody has developed the pitch as “something a bit like MySpace”. The latest one was for “a demographic of 11 to 25 year olds”, which to my mind is less “a demographic” and more “as many people who use social networking sites as possible”.

The advantage to the 50k club is that they know building web applications – as opposed to a static page – is complicated and takes time. They know time costs money, because they normally have run their own businesses in the past. They’re happy to pay for it, just not too much.

Talking this morning to Andy it occured as a thought that this may be a psychological barrier. £50,000 is enough to put into a project with some risk for a lot of the people who want to get in on the ground floor of Something Big. It’ll be easy to get investment for – if you don’t know 3 or 4 people who could spare £25k on “the next MySpace” you obviously don’t live in Manchester – and it doesn’t sound horribly expensive.

Thing is, the ideas are normally much bigger and when you go back and say “look, to do this idea right, in the timescales you want, with the scaling you want, is going to cost you about £100k” they get as shocked and offended as Yellow Pages boys.

It’s fantastic that so many people want to get involved in developing new businesses, it’s even better that all the fun action seems to be occuring in the North of England right now, but I think something needs to happen to improve expectations of the business community as a whole. I also think somebody needs to come up with a more innovative idea than copying MySpace.

Something great can happen here, and I think we should start by burning the Yellow Pages.