Innovation in Software

Right now, almost 100% of Vagueware’s revenue is through services. The objective for 2007 was to switch this so that nearly 100% of the revenue would be through products. Offering excellent little applications for SMEs and corporates, who would pay a license fee to oil their squeaking machines of information flow. Oh, the ideas. Many of them unique, some of them just better executions of what has been done before. You know the dream, you’ve had it yourself: build a customer base, sell the company and retire inside five years.

But there is a niggle. I have come to realise that as a one-man company, in need to grow the business I need to do something rather extraordinary. I’ve realised it’s not enough to produce really good products, and to execute the marketing well if I want to develop a solid business: I might score lucky and get a company I can sell pretty quickly that way, but if I want something sustainable and to grow now without taking extra finance on board, I need to do something different.

I want to build something people trust isn’t going to go under tomorrow, that can develop without me being at the helm all day long, that can go off on weird tangents without me spending all my time trying to think up new ideas, and that can get the benefits of a diverse and enthusiastic development team behind it without me spending huge amounts of money on coders.

In other words, I need to open source my code.

By making my code base open source I get around all those issues of “what happens if you get run over by a bus” and I help foster a far larger development community than I could ever hire. By giving the code away for free I help develop competition which – call me a free marketeer if you wish – I believe helps my company as much as it helps those who didn’t come up with the idea in the first place.

The disadvantage of course comes in the monetisation stage: by not locking the code base down, it’s not enough to just offer a product licensing fee. I need to think in terms of services people will pay for. Hosting, appliance boxes, customisation, support and maintenance deals, training, etc. all have to be considered. No longer is it just Software as a Service, but the software is free with an optional service. That requires a big re-think.

It also means a fundamental re-think of how I approach development of new ideas. I’ve realised that it’s not enough for me to just come up with an idea, throw out v0.1 and hope it flies. There’s a lot of scribbling in notepads as to how to deliver something a little “different” in that regard. With regards to those services, the I’ve filled several dozen pages with ideas, and I hope to experiment with all of them at some stage.

However, I have a confession to make: I’m scared.

All of this requires me to be ridiculously brave, and say to hell with the money: the money will take care of itself. That would be easy to do if I were rich and didn’t need to think about rent, bills and food, but I’m not. I’m pretty much broke and if it weren’t for that bespoke development work, I’d be pretty hungry too. But I’ll find a way, somehow. If it means taking on bespoke work through the rest of this year whilst I wait for revenues to pick up on other services, so be it.

This is going to take some courage I think, but I believe it’s the right thing to do in the long run. Along the way, I expect this site (and blog, and therefore feed) to get trashed in the coming weeks whilst I build something more aligned to where this is heading. Those of you who remember a previous incarnation of Vagueware will find some recurring themes in what gets released in a few weeks: that’s a good thing.

It’s going to be an interesting ride. Anybody want a ticket?