Innovation in Software

There are two kinds of innovation I want to talk about on vagueware:

• Ideas for whole new products and services that can be delivered with software
• Incremental changes to existing software products and services

I spend most of my time thinking about new products and services, the kind of thing that you can start a business off. Those ideas are generally jealously guarded by the people who think they thought of them first, but the simple truth is they have little value without execution: vagueware.com is about trying to get people executing on those ideas.

I have hundreds of ideas on my desk, on my wall, in my head, on my laptop, in notebooks, everywhere. They’re not going anywhere where they are. I do not have the time or the capital to make every single one of them happen. By placing them in the public domain over the coming months, I hope to do a couple of things:

• Somebody, somewhere will do something with them
• I will get the satisfaction that whilst not benefiting monetarily, I helped an entrepreneur and his customers

I hope that if you have an idea that you realise you’re never going to make happen, you’re going to have the courage to place it in the public domain and allow open source developers, start-ups and hobbyists in need of a way to spend their evening get started with it. They might even give you money, you never know.

Then there’s the second kind of idea – the incremental idea. The idea where you see a product or service out on the web or on your machine and you think “that’s great, but if it did…”

I’ve started cataloguing ideas I’ve had for vagueware and tagging them ‘vagueware’ – you can add ideas for vagueware too, and tag them so I see them – and as votes move up and down I’ll see what’s popular and what isn’t. I’ll use the tool itself to decide what to work on next within the tool. Yay for recursion!

I hope other developers use the site to do the same. By putting up ideas on the site for your own product and asking customers to go along and vote, you can get an assessment of what is going to fly and what isn’t.

Every page is editable, wiki-style, so your customers can improve your idea. Every idea has comments so you can have a little conversation around an individual idea.

By looking at a list of ideas in vote order, you can decide what is going to make customers happiest. By putting it on a 3rd-party site like vagueware, you get exposure to a whole bunch of people interested in people like you – innovative developers – who might not have heard of you anywhere else.

Or maybe you can just put an idea up and tag it with a publisher or product name in the hope that somebody at HQ will see it one day and act on it.

Manoj points me this morning to SeedCamp an almost-clone of Y-Combinator. If you’re a technology start-up the deal is this:

• You apply online with your idea for a technology start-up
• 20 teams get picked to spend a week in London where “there will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, product designers, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business”
• At the end of the week up to 5 ‘winners’ are picked. They’re each given €50,000 for a 10% stake in their businesses
• Those 5 teams move to London for 3 months and burn the €50,000 working on the business.
• 10 weeks in, you’re sat down with investors looking to get to the next level

Sound good? This is a disaster waiting to happen.

The Y-Combinator model which SeedCamp seeks to “be close to” is flawed on many levels. Mike Taber discusses this around Y-Combinator better than I could but all his points apply to SeedCamp, with just a few extra flaws in this model:

• The week-long programme at the start with all the experts almost sounds like a Hack Day format. It’s not. Those experts are not there to help you with your business – they’re there to help SeedCamp’s. It will be a grueling week, and the whole purpose is getting you used to toning down the passion and framing things in a way that makes accountants and lawyers happy. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.
• Whilst Y-Combinator want 6%, SeedCamp want 10%. It doesn’t matter that before you apply it means you think your idea is worth exactly €500k and not a penny more (or that SeedCamp think it’s worth not a penny less), you’re already in a weak position. Be aware right now, the moment you go into this and you take the money, it’s not your idea any more. It’s the same with any investor, but you’re jumping in with these guys pretty quick: they grill you for a week, but there’s no clue about what they’re going to do for you other than give you €50k. Trust me on this if you never trust me on anything else: your smallest worry as a start up is going to be money. Your biggest problems are going to be around how to do things you’ve never done before – you need to be sure when you take investment, the guys with the cash actually know what they’re doing with start-ups and are going to give you dedicated support beyond bank transfers.
• I can’t imagine any EU-based investor getting into a technology start-up after 10 weeks of solid development. I have no idea what happens on the tail end of this, but the SeedCamp model seems to be thinking that their investment is going to make you fly quickly, and if it doesn’t… well… hmmmm…

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: you can start a business with a few hundred quid. You need a computer, you need to know how to code, you need to know how to sell, you need to be dedicated and you need to be able to listen. That’s it.

You don’t need: business cards; investors; €50k; marketing experts; product designers; lawyers; accountants; printed letter heads; offices; a secretary; a phone system; or in fact, any of the things people who take funding spend the money on. You need a big pile of cash like you need a bullet in your head.

One of the few books I’ve read with this as its message that really made sense for me was Bootstrapping your Business by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson. I saw Gianforte speak at MMU Business School once, and his message that you just get started with selling and deal with the rest later was blunt, fresh and quite reassuring. He started several businesses with nothing and built them up to 9-figure businesses before exiting, so he clearly knows what he’s talking about. That’s my preferred route – it seems simpler.

The only real advantage I’ve seen to taking investment is that you can buy in expertise you wouldn’t get otherwise, but you run the risk of becoming nothing more than a talking shop – the SeedCamp route is the worst of all worlds: the talking shop with money to burn, but not quite enough to buy in quality expertise or time enough to absorb it.

SeedCamp might sound interesting, but I remain to be convinced we need it. If you’re going to take investment, take it properly. Otherwise my ethos is quite simple:

You just need a bit of soul and dedication.