I’ve been kicking around an idea for quite a while about a software application that I’d like to do. It would target a very specific but fairly large vertical market, and based on what I’ve seen so far of the other offerings, the field is definitely ripe for competition.
I’ve been holding off on posting about it for a couple reasons. One is that I’m still not sure how public I want to be about exactly what it is, for a variety of reasons, including the element of surprise, which may be more or less relevant depending on some other decisions yet to be made.
Regardless of those details, I do plan to post about the process as I go, it’s just a matter of how much detail I want to go into pre-launch. Either way, some of the key decision points up front that I am currently working through (and plan to expand on in future posts) are:
The name - I’ve done quite a bit of reading and research around branding recently, because I know how critical of a decision this is. In looking for feedback and suggestions, I will of course have to share a bit about what the product will be. I may (in these early stages) do that in a more private manner with those of you I know, so that the opinions you’ll hopefully offer will be well informed.
The business model - This one will probably decide a lot of other things. You’ll notice I used the word “product” in the first point, and the existence of this second point clearly indicates that I intend to make money on this venture. Only time will truly tell how successful it will be in that regard, but at the moment I’m hoping that it can eventually grow into being able to providing full time employment for me and eventually others.
Right now I’m on the fence between two models I’m familiar with, and open to considering others. Revenues from both models would be from a subscription based hosted service (at least the way I’m thinking about it right now). One would be the service-only, non open source approach employed by 37Signals for their products like Basecamp, etc. The second would be going open source (probably GPL) and still selling hosting services, similar to Automattic’s wordpress.com. Which leads into…
Closed or open source? - I heavily lean towards favoring open source projects, but there are some considerations for this particular type of application in which that aspect may be seen as more detrimental. In addition, there is the more obvious question of to what degree having a free version available to people who are skilled enough to host it themselves would cut into my potential revenue (if at all) vs. the increased free publicity that an open source offering would be likely to generate.
Programming language - I’ve already pretty much decided on this one. I went back and forth for quite a while as to whether I wanted to make it Java or Ruby on Rails. I’m now leaning heavily towards doing it on Rails but using JRuby, so that I can effectively capitalize on the best of both worlds. As with all the other points, though, I’m still open to thoughts and suggestions.
Well, that’s about it for the intro. Since I do plan to journal the progress of this project in blog form, from these up front decisions all the way through and beyond the release, I’ve considered branching off another blog dedicated to it, but I haven’t quite decided on that yet either.