aspiring technical entrepreneurs
This may appear obvious to some of you and not so to others.
For all you aspiring technical entrepreneurs out there if i were ever to give some advice from my experiences trying to build a few different types of online businesses over the last 7 years it would be this. Make sure the first thing you do is step away from the laptop and get a very simple A4 list of the problems your customers are facing. This is admittedly been the hardest thing for me to do when compared to keeping up with the latest and greatest technologies that will make my products fly.
For each component or feature you decide to implement, have a *real* problem that is satisfies - this is what they will pay for.
It's been hard coming from a technical background and not drawing use cases as my first step. Long before you get to use cases there is a whole bunch of things you need to do.
I not "get" how this works and so I am starting back at stage 1 just now (well 4 weeks into it), and although i have much of the technology actually developed (which some of you may have seen), I am actually agoing to go through the entire process, business plan and all, from the start and see what comes out at the other end.
I will scribble down what happens over the coming weeks and months and hopefully some of it will be useful to any of you folks looking to develop a product that will sell to someone other than us technophobes. Some may be obvious and other points not so. Let me know how i come across!
To end on a technical note - if you don't have Enterprise Architect, make sure you have a look now!
Steven.