Friday, November 30, 2007

An Entrepreneurial Story

I don't remember how exactly I got there, but while clicking through my morning feeds I ended up at the very interesting story of an Australian .NET micro ISV startup called Shuffle Text. They outline pretty much everything we learned when we started Coversant nearly seven years ago.

Some Gems
"And while we believed that technical differentiation would be enough to sell our product, we ended up being dead wrong."
"Change, it turned out, ended up being one of our worst development enemies."
"Of all those Google Ads signups, we got 0 feedback. All feedback on the product beta came from friends or friends of friends."
"There’s a bajillion ISV’s out there all competing to sell their crappy untested memory leaking piece of junk software. No matter how much time you spend perfecting your algorithm, improving the performance, and making sure you’ve got zero tolerance for leaks, NOBODY CARES. At the end of the day, it’s getting noticed that matters, convincing people that they should take a bet on you to solve their problems."

Don't give up guys. The product's been out less than a month and people are blogging about you! Your marketing seems pretty solid to me. While I don't have a use for your software at this very second. I'll certainly keep it on my radar. Oh yeah, consider putting out a completely free version, as in beer, not a trial.

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About the Author

Wow, you made it to the bottom! That means we're destined to be life long friends. Follow Me on Twitter.

I am an entrepreneur and hacker. I'm a Cofounder at RealCrowd. Most recently I was CTO at Hive7, a social gaming startup that sold to Playdom and then Disney. These are my stories.

You can find far too much information about me on linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/jdconley. No, I'm not interested in an amazing Paradox DBA role in the Antarctic with an excellent culture!