Tips for Software Entrepreneurs

INTRODUCTION

This site is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed. Check out this set of tips for software entrepreneurs for some of the best advice around.

Are you thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, but think that you don’t have what it takes? Or are you already an entrepreneur, but are just starting out and would like some advice? This booklet is intended to help software entrepreneurs get started on the right foot.

As software entrepreneurs, we tend to focus on functionality, development, and ROI. However, working with people is a necessary part of the job. The success or failure of our business often relies on our ability to connect with customers and vendors. Therefore, these tips might be useful for all software entrepreneurs.

The intrepid entrepreneur’s invaluable software development tips

1. Know what is most important to you as you seek a software development partner

Every option has its advantages and disadvantages, and you will have to weigh these against your priorities. The project management triangle is a good place to start analyzing this.

Ask yourself, what are my top priorities? For example:

Can you reduce the scope of the product and still achieve the kind of product you envisioned?
Do you have the capability of increasing your budget, or is it non-negotiable?
Is your timeline strict, or can you extend it to increase features or quality, or save money?

2. Quality is at the core of the project management triangle – and your project

No cost savings, increased time to market, or number of features will make up for a poor quality product. This is the one thing you cannot compromise. Your product has to perform its function consistently and well, whether it is designed for work or play.

Rather than building an all-encompassing product, focus on building a minimally viable product (MVP) first. Fortunately, with software products, MVP versions are accepted and even welcomed. But you must be clear with users that what you are releasing is an MVP version and price it accordingly. Use your MVP version to gather customer feedback and improve your product.

4. Use a free version to garner financing

I have seen several companies with enterprise product concepts start by successfully creating free, direct-to-consumer (DTC) versions as proofs of concept. Investors come on board to fund the enterprise version more willingly (and sometimes with fewer strings) when they can gauge the product’s market appeal from a trial release “in the wild.”

5. Educate yourself on onshore versus offshore development

There are advantages to both, with corresponding disadvantages. This is a much bigger topic than I can cover here. Here are a couple resources that can help.

Roadmap for Successful Outsourcing http://www.coherentsolutions.com/content-resources…
The It Outsourcing Guide by Rob Aalders http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsourcing-Guide-Rob-Aa…

6. Look for shared company characteristics and premium customer service

Some key items to consider are:

Philosophy and culture – do they deliver on their processes and do what they say they’ll do?
Excellent communication skills – do they ask clarifying questions when there’s ambiguity? Do they offer their opinions as partners, or are they merely silent order takers?
Ready access to team members – can you work directly with the team or are there layers of bureaucracy to navigate?
Quick turnaround – do they treat your schedule as their own, showing urgency to get your product out the door?
Appropriate responses to changes or disruptions – are they focused on solutions rather than posturing?

7. Look for customer-facing, software product expertise

There are thousands of software developers from whom you could choose a partner. Many of these have created excellent enterprise applications, but nothing that was sold as a product. This is a game-changing difference. Software products are different than custom business applications. These differences include:

Risk. Developing a software product is a high risk venture. Products are your bread and butter, and they define you in the marketplace. A successful product can generate a positive image and presumed competency for your company, while a poor product can reverse that image overnight.
Stringent standards. Products are developed to meet a market need and as such must adhere to standards set by the market. Software developers familiar with products have learned to work within these constraints.
User orientation and marketability. Unlike an internal business application, a software product does not have ready-made users who are required to learn and accept it. A product has to engage and gain user acceptance. A familiar, intuitive interface is paramount. If your product is cumbersome and difficult, customers can simply move on to the next vendor for another solution.
Timing. When bringing a new software product to market, time is of the essence. If a competitor beats you to market, your investment can be for naught. A software product development partner will understand and be prepared for the late nights and extra effort required to meet unmovable deadlines, as well as the constraints of a budget set by inflexible investors.

8. Find a partner who adds value

You have the vision. You understand your audience and the need. Your software development partner needs to understand how to make that vision a reality. They should have expertise in a wide variety of technologies, platforms and application types. They should bring the latest in new technologies to you, and challenge you to think deeper and more broadly. They should speak up and suggest options, not just take orders.

Of course, these tips are just a start. If you are new to software product development, you should seek out as many successful software product entrepreneurs as you can, as well as immerse yourself in articles and research on the topic. The more prepared you are as you go into this process, the more likely you will have a successful outcome.

OTHER 5 IMPORTANT TIPS EVERY SOFTWARE ENTREPRENEURS SHOULD KNOW

If I was going to start a business in the software industry today, with no previous business experience, I’d want to know the following.

1. If You’re not a Developer, Partner With a Software Entrepreneur That Is

When I started in the software development world over 30 years ago, then ideas could be rough concepts, scratched down on paper, taken to someone who could code, and turned into a small program. Now, however, code is one small piece of a massive system within another massive system, layered and complex. If you don’t have any experience in the coding world, you’ll never know what language to code it in, what platform to build on, or how best to roll out your software. Suffice it to say, if you’re a software entrepreneur that plans to start a business in the software development space, have someone who knows it by your side.
Partnering with someone who knows code and is personally invested in the process will help you guide your steps and make important scaling decisions early. The software development world is vast and constantly expanding. Even experienced developers face diseconomies of knowledge simply because of the speed at which their industry evolves. While other business models may not require personal knowledge of goods or services in their field, software development, in my opinion, is not one of them.

2. Hire Inquisitive, Passionate Developers

Software work can be tedious unless you love it. When I hire developers, I look for people who are working on something outside of what they are trained to do simply because they are curious. This tells me they are always learning, which speaks to the diseconomies of knowledge concept I brought up earlier.
I also look for people who are passionate, empathetic, and a little paranoid. Why? Because passionate coders care about how great their code is and will work on it without feeling like they’re doing work. Empathetic coders will finish a project, and, if bugs show up or the code breaks, they will wonder how many people could be affected by the error, then go fix it for everyone. And slightly paranoid coders are those who double, triple, and quadruple check their work to make sure it’s perfect. When you roll all of these traits together, you end up with high-quality code and software that works—which, at the end of the day, is all the customer cares about.

3. Keep a Small, Agile Development Team

Less is more. Patriot Software, my accounting and payroll software company, has about 10 software developers. We’re making software that is taking on the software of companies with legions of developers, and we’re winning awards while doing it. How is this even possible? Easy, because it’s better to have a small software development team of amazing employees working on something they are passionate about than a large team of disconnected ones working on small fragments of something they don’t know the final look of.

There is a concept out there known as the Mythical Man Month which disproves the concept that suggests adding more people to a project makes that project go faster. This isn’t just a project management concept however, it’s business building philosophy. If you put together the right team of developers, they can build great software faster than an army of developers, and your company won’t collapse under the weight of your payroll!

4. Embrace Failure

This is an agile principle, but it applies to any business that has to prioritize speed-to-market. Basically, failure is not your enemy as a software entrepreneur so long as you keep it on a small and manageable scale. Work fast, test, fail fast, iterate, retest, etc. …

Most businesses want to avoid failure on a large scale. Well, the best way to do that is to fail on a small scale first to test how you’re doing. Instead of trying to eradicate failure from your development process, embrace it and the interactions it generates. After all, failure is the best way to learn.

5. Grill Applicants With Hard Questions

Hard is a broad term. Some software developers simply do not like other humans as much as they like machines. They may be great coders but they can’t share information with other developers. Not because they don’t want to, but because they simply aren’t wired that way. For them, human-to-human communication can be “hard.” However, human-to-human interaction is one of the most elusive software developer qualities out there.

For others, hard means the actual development side of the job. Software development skills are in high demand, but that doesn’t mean you should take anyone who can list them on their resume. When you interview candidates, you should be asking hard technical questions. Test their knowledge with real problems and ask how a candidate would solve them. Ask them about situations in which they failed. Probe them to see how they handle stress and how they work in teams. It may seem cruel to put them under such scrutiny with these interview ideas, but very few things can damage a company like a bad employee—especially when that employee has access to your base code!

CONCLUSION

Is your next career move in the software field? There are some tips you should keep in mind when starting as an entrepreneur. 1. Understand that you are probably not the first person to think of this great software idea, and chances are there are hundreds or thousands of other people with the same or similar idea. Since it is usually a winner take all business, you will have to be very competitive and produce results. 2. Keep in mind that you will probably not be working on your own project–no matter how great it is–for 5 or 10 years. It is more likely that you will sell it in 4 years if it is really successful, and then move on to the next thing. 3. Realize that customers are more likely to buy from people and companies they know than someone new. Be sure to put a face on your company, since most software companies don’t have a face (not even a real person’s name), let alone a personality or unique character. 4. Don’t expect to be able to get funding for your venture from Silicon Valley angels or VCs (venture capitalists). Most software firms come from angel money and bootstrapping–getting loans from family, friends and the founders themselves, maybe getting an S