Starting a software company? Some useful links:
I made a presentation at Microsoft’s Tech Days conference in Toronto about using .NET to create a software company.
Here are some key links of things I found useful.
Microsoft Partner programs
BizSpark is Microsofts core progam for software startups. It gives you access to microsoft tools, as well as opportunities to network and connect to other partners. A must for any ISV starting up and using Microsofts platform. It gives you access to the Microsoft software you need to develop your solution, and in the case of web based products, to run your web site. Check it out.
Community of fellow Software Entrepreneurs:
The Business of Software is a discussion board hosted by Fog Creek software where lots of successful or aspiring software vendors/developers discuss the business. You’ll find both technical discussions, and business discussions. Subjects discussed that are of interest include marketing, pricing and customer support among others. Often, people present new ideas, an ask the community to comment, or announce the release of their new tool and get feedback from the group. There are a lot of people who have build software companies that have learned things the hard way and share here. Worth taking a look.
Local Toronto events
- Democamp – Interesting speakers, then 5 minute demos from local startups
- Startup drinks – Informal, monthly meetup in a pub of people doing startups, or helping startups. Good networking.
- Toronto Code Camp – big developer event for all things Microsoft- great content.
Mars
Mars Discovery district Mars is a private-public partnership that provides various types of support for startups and entrepreneurs.
It may not be for everyone, but I’ve enjoyed a number of the presentations they hold from time to time, and the Entrepreneurship 101 lecture series.
I have taken advantage of their advisory program- and found it good source of advice, and a way to have ideas and strategies reviewed by people with experience and expertise.
Creating your Website to sell your wares
Of course, if you are an ASP.NET guru, or your product itself is a web application, then you might pass. But if you are not a web developer, and want a free, relatively easy and certainly very powerful way to make a great looking website, I recommend WordPress, and I have to say that it has far exceeded my expectations in every way. It gives you a powerful, easy to use content management system, and the extensive community and long list of plugins and themes available mean that you keep the custom coding to a minimum, while being able to have a great looking website to market your software.
Google Analytics
People say you get what you pay for, but there are always some exceptions. Google Analytics is free, yet its a powerful web analytics platform, and a key part of any software companies toolkit. Its critical to know who is visiting your web site, what they are looking at. Google Analytics lets you understand where your visitors are coming from, and how they are responding to your website content. Being a data company, we love the data so much that we’re expanding our product line to include a tool Analytics Canvas, that lets you extract data out of Google analytics using their web API, and then transform it in our visual environment. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Rackspace Cloud sites
Is it up 100% of the time? Unfortunately not. But it’s pretty reliable in my experience, and technical support is good. What it really gives us is speed and flexibilty without messing around with servers.
This is a specific offering from Rackspace that is not a full server environment, and has some limitations- but it can support both PHP and .net, as well as allows you to create MySQL and SQL Server database instances.
We use it running wordpress, complete with all the MySQL databases we need, we host a number of sites and development environments at a very reasonable price.
And because it’s distributed, if we get surges of traffic (which is always the goal) it will handle it easily, with a reasonable extra charge if we exceed bandwidth or CPU limits. Better to pay for surges than to have your website go down, and it would cost a fortune to be paying every month for a server sized for the peak traffic that you will hopefully generate one day.