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Concept to Product in 30 Days!!

A handful of steadfast readers out there may remember that, a few years back, I challenged myself with developing a list of 30 unique business ideas in 30 days, with the goal of launching a product and building a business.

During that time, I did a lot of blogging (sometimes as late as 3am, to write a blog entry while on vacation, after everyone else had fallen asleep). The whole endeavor really got me into a mindset of wide-open possibilities, to the point where it was hard to stop thinking of new ideas and actually focus on just one.

(I’m going to make a bold statement: The people who complain about a lack of software ideas have never really spent a significant chunk of time going through a methodical brainstorming process.)

Now, after two years, I’m finally making good on the implied promise of that brainstorming month.

At the end of June, I’m going to release a new product.

Later this afternoon, I’m going to write my first line of code.

Before I get into all the details of the project, I’ll tell you a little bit of the back-story of how I got from there to here…

DISCLAIMER: If you’re not the kind of person who enjoys long rambling stories about nothing, you can probably just skip the rest of this post and wait for the next one, where I’ll actually talk about the goals and architecture of the new product.

Anyhow, back when I finished that month of brainstorming, I made a decision about the best idea in the bunch and started working on an analytics application for the stock market. I was a little nervous about competition from the big online brokerages, since E-Trade and AmeriTrade had already started offering advanced charting and analytics tools with their basic accounts. But I kept working on that project for about six months before finally crumbling under a few major obstacles.

Most importantly: I couldn’t find a data vendor who could provide the type of data I wanted to bundle with my application.

TANGENT: To accurately back-test the stock market, you need the historic prices of all the companies that went out of business or were de-listed from the major stock exchanges, not just the ones still alive and kicking today. Ignoring all the defunct companies creates a survivorship bias in the data and invalidates the analysis. I talked to every vendor I could find, and they all offered twenty years of history for any company currently traded on the major exchanges. But nobody could provide a complete history including (for example) all the companies that died in the dot-com bust.

Since I didn’t think I could cobble together a satisfactory data feed, and since I had planned for the feed to be the work-horse of my revenue strategy, I scrapped the project.

At that point, I got an offer for a job in Boston, with the promise of a leadership role in the research department of a well-funded media startup. I moved across the country to accept the position, putting my entrepreneurial ambitions on the back-burner again for another year or so.

Last November, I left that job (on good terms, of course :) to start my own company, with the intention of using consulting projects to bootstrap my product development ambitions. The self-employment thing has worked out well. I really really enjoy the flexibility, the creative freedom, and the sense of strategic ownership (also: I have the coolest boss ever).

My biggest consulting project was vast and complex and researchy (I was working on a prototype of an agent-based collaborative decision-making simulation), so I didn’t actually have much time to spend on my own product.

ANOTHER TANGENT: One of the things about research/prototype projects is that there’s literally no limit to the amount of time you can spend working on them. By working the weekend, or into the wee hours of the night, you can flesh out the prototype just a little bit more, making it slightly sexier to the client, who just might spend millions of dollars on a full implementation.

Anyhow, I wrapped up the big project a few weeks ago (the client decided to pass on the full implementation), and all of my other projects had already wound down over the previous month or two.

As I comb through my professional network looking for new projects, I nevertheless have a lot of time on my hands to finally do some solid product development. But within the next month or so, I expect to find a new client, and then I’ll be up to my eyeballs in consulting work again.

That means I only have about 30 days to get as much work done as is humanly possible. At the end of June, or potentially early in July, I need to be ready with a beta-stage product.

And, as the fates would have it, there’s a whole gaggle of other solo software entrepreneurs doing the same damn thing!!

They have a website and an RSS feed and they’ve described the response from the one-man-software-company community as “incredible interest“.

Looks like June is officially “Get Down to Brass Tacks and Finally Build Your Damn Product Month”.

Maybe in November we can all write novels together…

So, everyone’s going to be blogging about their experiences, talking about their design and implementation and marketing processes. Looks like it’ll be a real hootenanny, and I thought it’d be fun to throw my hat into the ring as well.

I have a novel product idea (not one of the ideas from the 30-day brainstorming project, though). I have a few graphic design sketches. And I have the utmost confidence in the marketability of the product. It’s ambitiously big for one person (especially given the constrained time-frame), but if anyone can do it, I can.

Over the next 30 days, I’ll tell you all about it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under software, 30daysprint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.