Finding a software startup idea seems to occupy many developers.  There’s a lot of valid things to look out for and understand the importance of.  For me, this is what I try to keep in front of me.  Being an idea guy, and a developer I’m often left with a lot of ideas and not enough time to build them all, so I have to pick.

First, we have to understand ideas. None are original. So few that that statement is true.  We’re just connecting everything to the web in a novel way, like libraries connected people to information in books.  Other variants include, attempting to internetize / computerize processes that currently aren’t.

Second, all ideas generally start with an opportunity. To sell. Either to someone you already have, or a way to reach them (adwords, etc).

Third, the idea has to be marketable in a way that you can market it. If you have connections in an industry, it’s not a bad place to start. I prefer to make the first few sales personally in-town to get the pitch and value presentation down before putting it online.  It might not be a sustainable or self-sufficient business model long term depending on what you’re after, but that’s a fit you have to find.

Fourth, any product is 80% marketing. 20% Product. Marketing is the single most important skill you need to get, not more coding or idea generation. Learning to sell my idea, approach and vision is the single biggest asset I have in my consulting business.  Customers invest in me as much as my idea.  The idea, sadly doesn’t have as big of an impact as it should.

Start learning marketing immediately. In general, in person, and online. Yes, it might not be exciting to learn marketing as a developer, but you wanted a business, not a coding job.  Consider yourself doing the world a great service of providing better software raising the quality of life, and putting in the yeoman like effort to learn and implement marketing to reach them.  Marketing in many ways is just clear, communication that focuses on benefits that a customer is looking for.  All developers have to do is learn to stop talking about features and learn to talk about benefits.  You have to reach customers who are looking for your product. Personally, directly, or automated online through adwords.

Using these two approaches to generate ideas (Personal/industry connections vs. online niche searching), I’ll share a few ways I discovered where good ideas exist:

1. Consult. Clients. Listen. Notice what isn’t out there. Usually low competition and long term customers because no one’s doing it.  Most customers have a competitive advantage of “this is how we do it”.  Learn it and see if some software could benefit from it.  Find the processes that take several hours a day or week and automate them.

2. Scratch your own itch. Solve a problem that you need solved. There could be something there. Try to pick something broadly appealing enough.

3. Find an online niche People are searching for things constantly. There are holes and weak/new niches where you can establish yourself.

4. Ignore creating new demand If you build something no one’s looking for, it will be harder to get people to find something they don’t know how to discover.

Out of these approaches to build an idea:

1. Find a small business tool you can bill $35-75/month. Even if the idea is a complete failure and only get 10 clients, it’s still $350-750 a month in passive income. In the beginning that’s nice to have while you try out the next thing.

2. Leave your charity to giving, not receiving. Do not do any ideas that are a few dollars a month unless you have very strong response to your beta email list in a low cost adwords niche.  It’s often better to have 5 customers giving you 20 dollars a month, than 40 giving you 2 dollars a month and build a slow growing business around it.

Once you have some ideas, you have to validate them. How to pick?

1. Don’t try to swing for the fences and build the next Facebook the first time. Chances are you’ll go through a few ideas.  You need to be able to pay your way in life while you do and try to be a little successful along the way.  Pick reasonable niche ideas that people are searching for. Test that niche via adwords to see what kind of response / interest you get to sign up for your beta mailing list while you build.

2. Build a simple proof-of-concept to see if you do it better, simpler, faster. See if that simple attempt makes your client happy.

3. Like 37 Signals says, release something embarrassing and charge for it. See if people pay.  Keep improving it.

4. Once you find something that pays, build yourself a modest money maker that makes a few hundred to a few thousand a month. Chain a few of these money making ideas together.

5. Now that you’ve had some experience exploring, validating, launching and automating ideas, you have enough passive income to sustain your lifestyle while you now go ahead and swing for the fences with a big idea.  Of course, it took a little longer than expected but you learnt a lot and are much more well rounded at developing online business ideas.

We’ve all heard it: The ability to learn and apply how to communicate with skill is priceless, no matter what we do. At the top of most fields we will often find the best communicators.  The jury might be out on other things, but they do know how to share their message.

Being limited to 140 characters per message in Twitter, I’ve had to get very good at expressing my thoughts and ideas simply and clearly for maximum impact.  It doesn’t have to be bold, or brash, just clear. In this way, Twitter has become one pencil sharpener of expressing my thoughts and ideas.  How does it do that?

The long and short of it is this: When working on a project, product, business, or startups, we’re in the boat of having to communicate a lot, clearly and quickly.  Twitter helps us to develop the habit of communicating with less distracting noise, and more punchy signal.

Like the web, we all need to define what Twitter will do for us based on how we use it. For me, Twitter participates in introducing and sharing ideas that better help us define and navigate the world around us.

Twitter promotes quitting the brain dump to communicate. As a developer of projects and products, be it someone’s startup idea, or my own, I have to learn to cut through the tendency to take the easy way out and “write everything” to “cover it all”.  This is known as the brain dump.  Whether an email, on a website, or in your product, brain dumping as a way of communicating only increases complexity. It reduces focus. It makes people work to find the nuggets they are looking for.  (They won’t and they’l leave) Worse, brain dumps to communicate leave more questions than it answers, and a greater sense of confusion than it began with.

More signal, less noise. Less is definitely more. With all projects, products and startups, we often wear an extra hat of copywriters.  Write less, cut in half, and half again, right?  We often know the most about the product, how it works, and the market fit, and being able to find and speak to it with a lot of impact is a huge thing that the lean startup approach has emphasized.   Learning to find the essence and knowing what message to amplify is critically invaluable.

Training ourselves to speak about benefits instead of features. Since we’re focused on building features, we can have a tendency on communicating the features at length, and not always the benefit.  On Twitter, answering “How does this relate to me” is how information travels quickly.  “What it does” doesn’t seem as interesting.  Always developing our skill to communicate benefits is invaluable in all projects and products.

If we examine “How does this relate to me” about the relevancy of Twitter itself, we can notice some interesting things.

First there were opinions about what twitter was about.

“Twitter just IRC on the web.”
“Twitter is the wall chat of BBS (bulletin board systems) in the 1990’s”

There were the opinions where everyone wondered how is this useful to me.

“Twitter makes it hard to interact in so few characters.”
“Twitter seems like a popularity contest.”
“Who cares about typing everything you’re thinking or doing every second of the day.”

From this, a few things have become apparent about Twitter to me.

Twitter shares something with the web of the 1990’s.  It’s anything, and everything, to anyone and everyone. Tweeting about every moment, thought and whatever, is the equivalent of having flashing text on your website in the 90’s.  Cool to some at first, painful for everyone.  When we were new to Twitter, we were feeling things out.  What’s too much? what’s too little?  How do I participate in sharing?  How do I find what’s important to me?

We had Geocities in the 90’s.  Sites weren’t the greatest, but everyone was involved in consuming, expressing and sharing information with each other.  Blinking text lost out on the web, just like sharing your every thought at every second has (hopefully) on Twitter.  Search engines became a relevant way to link strangers with information that they wouldn’t know about.

Twitter has become a live, searchable stream of benefits to me. How we learned and evolved in expressing and sharing information has lead to a huge impact in the last 10 years.  Everything and everyone is becoming more, and more connected, and we’re having to deal with too much information.

Twitter helps us deal with massive information overload. Those who learn to share and communicate in 140 characters become more and more relevant as information overload and bombardment increases every year.  Conveniently, being able to write good copy for your projects or product is also very, very, powerful.

For now, the best signal to noise adjuster is people.  Computer’s can’t exactly put together the information stream we are trying to piece together ourselves as we go. We need to be able to tune things in, or out, as easily as changing an order at a restaurant. So, we pay attention to those who have a clear, consistent stream of knowledge so it can become a part of ours. Rinse, repeat with others to create our own meal from the buffet of information overload.

While it might be foolish to say there won’t be anything like it again, Twitter has, increasingly found it’s way into our lives as a communication format like email, fax, or phone. Consume it in many different ways.  Participate in just as many. Except, Twitter is a community like Facebook at the same time.  That’s unique.  And I’ll keep working to make the most of it.

So, if you made it this far, take the one benefit from the ideas above, or your own, and share how you’ll apply it.

Every business needs cashflow (and profit) to survive like the body needs oxygen, food, and air.  Just because a business has cashflow, doesn’t mean it’s a success, much like we aren’t a success in life just because we sat around and survived.

If you have to mislead to make a dollar, it’s like tricking a girl into liking you.  You might make some money/trick her for a while, but it won’t last.

The better the mutual fit, the better the relationship.  As is often the case it’s best to see if you can work well together.  The client, or the vendor, alone, can’t make the relationship work.  Both have to be present.

As for finding the right work..

Know your product.  Know the value you deliver.  Know the clients it will benefit.  Only sell to them and you’ll have a lasting business.

Always generate more value than which you are paid. Otherwise your client turnover rate after they feel “had” will be much higher than it needs to be.

It’s easy to try and be someone else in business.  The problem is it always comes back full circle.  If you like honesty, and integrity, and when people eat their own cooking before giving it to you as advice, do it yourself.

Not every customer values it, but not every customer is for you.  There’s a big difference between a good dollar and a bad dollar.  It’s tough in the start but it’s worth it.

Be a defender of keeping goodness and kindness fashionable.    Your startup is your declaration of your moral and professional independence.

For one of the original software development bloggers, at the center of the startup, micro-isv movement to make a decision like this, it seems a little strange at first..

Joel mentions a number of reasons that I think are interesting of what a startup may face, once a startup has.. started up.

1. Part of the reason he’s no longer writing is that he has so many customers that his blog posts seem to deeply offend one of his clients in one way or another.Plausible? Sure. But isn’t differentiation what a product is built on?  I think this could be the topic of a blog post on it’s own by Joel to see what kind of things others in startups have to look forward to when you get large(r).
2. Growth means there’s revenue for traditional advertising. I would think, though, that tools for developers are ultimately best directly connected to them instead of magazine ads?

Joel might be big enough and he doesn’t need to, or can’t benefit from blogging as he did prior…  With Stack Overflow taking on the answer / thought market and opening things up beyond him, maybe there’s room for a lot more voices, that can be found easily.

Maybe Joel was developing the best bug tracking software in the world, and attracting the best developers in the world, so that when FogBugz reached it’s sweet spot, he can go onto building the best software company in the world?

Who knows.

I do know that writing, and sharing doesn’t leave you once you start, and know the value of being shared with, especially after many years.

Joel’s posts have helped so many that I don’t think many will lose their value or relevance.  Whether it was the pay-scale matrix, or why the command and conquer or econ 101 management won’t work with software developers, it’s rare to have reasonably concise, applicable, exploratory rants that were sane as it’s readers most of the time, and willing to have it’s share of mind-stretching ideas like anyone being stretched by growth.

If this is the last of Joel blogging, thanks for doing it.  The fact that Joel replies to emails and shared what he learnt so others could join the movement to make the world a better place with better software.

Will it be the last we hear from him in books, conferences, articles elsewhere..?  Doubt it.  His recent introduction to mercurial at www.hginit.com is a prime example.

I hope Joel continues to create and write, and if not, we see his writing has inspired others to write and share.

Joel I know you read more than you ever let on, so if your eyes reach here, which I’ll do my best to ensure, remember that with our talents we have a responsibility to share what has been shared and taught to us by life and others.  No guilt trip intended, the world owes us nothing.

Let’s step back from this and see the general picture.

Does this decision by Joel mean blogging is ultimately useless for startups? I don’t think so. At all.

Most companies, indeed, do use their blogs for boring news releases is relevant.

Blogs are all about relevancy. Blogs, like products that provide relevancy thrive.

Blogs will always have their place to share information, and for us, resources for startups looking to reach their market through the public seeking their content.  If you don’t have the marketing money, a blog is a key way to demonstrate and share expertise and knowledge.

I can say that the last year of writing this blog has showed me that I need to write more, and often.

Check out the slide show here, my thoughts below.

No One Cares About Your Stupid Little Startup

I put a lot of time on my 15″ Macbook Pro.  An average of 8-10 hours a day.  Every day.  The last 3 years since I switched back to Mac (since we all started on Apples in elementary school) have been incredible.  No longer have I been tied up dealing with Windows to do the smallest things like connect a new camera to get a photo to fight with drivers.  For the most part Mac just works, gets out of the way and let’s you focus on the task at hand.

Then, there was the day the music died.  November 16th, 2009, for me, to be exact.  I remember it, like it was yesterday.  I am working at the office, no problems.  Arrive at a clients, and the screen won’t turn on.  Try to reboot, no luck.  Everything seems to be turning on, except the screen.  Strange.

The HP/Compaq technician in me from the late 90’s speaks up and tells me this might be that nasty Nvidia chip failure affecting the Santa Rosa Macbook Pros, which I own.  But was it?  I’ve seen a video card or twenty fail in my life and its usually a graceful fit of annoying colors, lines, pixels not showing correctly that leads to an eventual death.

A screen just to go black with that?  I didn’t even get to say goodbye, or try to copy off my latest working files. What would I do if I didn’t have a recent backup?

Enter AppleCare.  You see, for years I was happy that Compaq (and then HP when they acquired Compaq) had nearly the world’s best extended warranty. They did, and likely still are very high.    AppleCare, I had heard was another beast.

I get on the phone and get booked into my local Apple store with an appointment 60 minutes later.  Total fluke, as they’re always booked up.  It was a cool feeling walking in and seeing my name as the next customer in line.  It was even cooler as the Apple concierge wondered how I hacked myself to the top of the list without having been in the store.  Nothing an AppleCare rep can’t put you on hold and get done, I guess.

After speaking with the knowledgeable rep, they ordered me a new system board.  Problem, I’m leaving town 2 days later.  They manage to pull it off and I make it rain chocolates at the store.  Everything is back and running.

Until it died again.  I got the dreaded spinning wheel on grey screen.  I felt like throwing my laptop into the water, pulling it out, and then throwing it in again.  But I didn’t.  Called AppleCare and they tried to help.  No luck.

On my way back to Edmonton, I was in Vancouver for the day.  I stopped by the AppleCare store and they had the part I needed.  And they would change it for me before my flight left!  Two flukes?  I doubt it.  There’s no way this kind of service is to be expected or reasonable, but I’m so glad they stepped up.

I’m tired, and fly back home. The repaired laptop awaits it’s glorious return to productivity. I turn it on in the next morning.  Same problem.  Did someone forget to turn on the computer fully?

My heart sank, to the bottom of my feet.  I could have just bought another Macbook Pro, smashed this one up, made a video for Youtube and mailed it to Apple stating I couldn’t handle 2 bad system board replacements in addition to my original failure.

I called AppleCare like someone might call an counseling hotline.  I spoke of the great help I received, but the poor results.  Brian, my original contact, quickly escalated me to a senior adviser.  He took a few minutes to read everything I had endured and at this point likely noticed I should have been screaming and foaming from the mouth, but wasn’t.  He got how frustrated and let down, and paralyzed I was.  Running a backup of your mac on a mac mini isn’t the same.  Yes, I didn’t lose anything, but I wasn’t gaining either.

The senior advisor said I had gone through enough.  He wanted to heal my shattered heart with the warmth of a replacement machine. I was skeptical.  I told him I had been hurt before.  What if this replacement had issues because it was the new macbook?  I might be crazy to turn down new equipment, but I like what I have and it works well.  He assured me he felt comfortable reccomending it so I decided to take the plunge to a new Macbook Pro, at a reasonable cost.

Now I wait.  Hurry up China.

The main thing I’ve found about Social Media that is unique is instead of customers seeking products, services and solutions; the products and services find the clients by reaching them.

People may look in places.  Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.  What reaches them through these means though, is something entirely different than a traditional marketing sense.  People are no longer looking for a product.  We review.  We read.  We compare.  We debate.  We review some more.

In all of this reviewing and deciding there is a taking of people’s opinions.  I recently read something that consumers will trust a review 80% of the time in their purchases, and advertising (online or otherwise) about 15% of the time or so.  I wish I had the link and if I find it I’ll post it.

Today I came across an article titled: Ten things to do before launching your blog.

It touches on some great points.  Some I knew, others were new and well well explained.  I have shortened the article to the main points below.  Click on the link above to read the entire article!

Study: Seek out the good people and follow them.

Start building buzz: Everyone should know that a blog is coming and they should be excitedly awaiting your arrival.

Secure the appropriate accounts: KnowEm.com , Google Analytics, Technorati, Feedburner.

Get your house in order: Put up a compelling call-to-action is you’re looking to secure emails for a newsletter. Take steps to make it easy for users to share your content, both via email and the social networks.

Content

Create a content strategy: Editorial calendars.

Seed content:

Decide: Ads or No Ads?:

Promotion

Build your promotional team:

Comment on other blogs, message boards and forums:

Respond to comments on your own blog:

I recently read that a product is 80% marketing and 20% actual product.  That probably would explain why garbage can succeed and great software can fail.

The truth is as developers, startup entrepreneurs, it’s critical to know how to sell and market.  Without learning the ability to have the conversation to sell, there may not be much of a reason to start building anything.

Often, as is the case, we put off the unfamiliar and get working on the familiar, “to make some good progress”.

This often means programming.  Start building.  Get out the measuring tape.  That carpenter’s pencil, the wood glue.  Get to it.

Here’s the thing:

Just because I can build a shed without a blueprint, doesn’t mean I should build a house without a blueprint.  Especially if I don’t know how to sell the house, or build a sellable house.

Building without the plan is in essence hurting your hard work even more, and delaying your potential success.  The sooner you start your conversation, start your story, and get potential customers engaged and involved in a beta, the greater you have increased your risk.

Instead, learn to start the conversation first. Learn to spread the news first.  Learn to attract the traffic and input you need, first.

We know you can build anything, at the speed of light.  But those 6-12 months will still mean you did no marketing at that time.  There’s little more helpful than having a mailing list already built up of potential customers as well as some google ranking love for your product already.

If you’re still not sold on it, try this law:

Less code = fewer bugs = quicker release = quicker iteration = quicker profitability