ISV Startup Resources
There are plenty of resources and help available when starting an ISV, probably too much. When starting our company Contigo, we spent a long time reading, talking, researching and surfing for help, advice and hopefully some financial assistance. Pretty soon we decided we were going to be a self funded startup and fund the company through revenue rather than outside investment. This is very much the approach recommended by the Beermat Entrepreneur which is one of the most useful books we read. It has worked out fine for us - the big benefit of being a software company is the main cost is people, so if you can afford to live on bread and water for a few months before you start earning revenue, you should be OK.
The Getting Real ebook by 37Signals is a great read and provides a great philosophy on how to build applications and run a company. We use the Basecamp application by 37Signals as a project portal for our clients. 37Signals are Web2.0 poster boys and are the guys who "invented" Ruby on Rails as part of building Basecamp.
Microsoft has two great programs for new and small ISV's - the Action Pack allows partner companies to get a bunch of Windows, Office and server licences for a small annual fee. The Empower program is aimed at ISV companies as a first step to becoming a Certified or Gold partner. It provides 5 Visual Studio, MSDN and other licences for internal use. This meant we were fully licensed for Office, Windows, Visual Studio, Exchange etc.
Microsoft does have a web site dedicated to startups called the Startup Zone; it's still a little light on content but is useful. There are lots of good programs from MS on helping ISV companies build and deliver products, especially if they are using the latest and greatest technology. Some examples worth looking at are Innovate On and Metro (invitation required from your local DPE). SaaS (Software as a service) is being heavily pushed as well by MS, if that is your thing. When you do sign up as a MS partner (you can be a registered partner for free) make sure you use the Solution Profiler to describe your products and services - we have had a few useful leads via this route.
As I mentioned before, we also do a reasonable amount of development work with Oracle. Many of our customers still use Oracle as their preferred database so any solution we provide has to be able to run against either Oracle or SQL Server. Oracle also has a good partner program called Technology Network, which allows you to download and use any of their software for internal development (non-production use for free) - it's the Oracle equivalent of MSDN Universal for $0.
There are various good blogs/sites on starting up and running a company and for doing the non-technical things like marketing and sales:
- Bob Walsh - "inventor" of the term MicroISV and author of the MicroISV book
- Seth Godin - prolific author and speaker on marketing
- Guy Kawaski - author of Art of the Start
- Joel Spolsky - ex Microsoftie who runs Fogcreek software
One big thing to realise when you do start your own company is you no longer have the support of a large IT department - you are the IT department. You suddenly have set up your own email, servers, backups, source code control, finance systems, CRM etc. This is where the Action Pack helped enormously - we use Exchange and Sharepoint for as much as possible, and various web based tools such as Basecamp. We've had to buy a bunch of servers and organise off site backup, organising hosting for our web site and so on. Now we are a certified partner we now use Team Foundation Server for source code control and work item tracking, together with the Scrum template from Conchango and TeamPlain Web Access which is now free since being bought from Microsoft and now has the catchy title of Team System Web Access Power Tool.
In the next instalment, I'll start a getting a little more techy and answering the question - how as an ISV with only limited resources can you build enterprise level ASP.NET applications reasonably quickly?