People in the microISV world tend to protect their ideas as if they were their first born. Derek Sivers points out why its better to spend that time on execution of your idea.

I wonder where Derek would classify CD Baby which is the company he founded and where he is the sole programmer.

via Business Pundit

Over on the microISV forums, Jose has asked for help choosing his logo. Take a second and vote for your choice.

Steve, from The Furrygoat Experience, posted that he really liked TopDesk from Otaku Software but was uninstalling it because of the nag balloons that prompt for purchase. James from Otaku found the post and, within hours, offered an explanation for their choice of using help balloons instead of crippled features or time restraints and also offered Steve a free copy. By providing top notch service and communication, Steve made the purchase and became a TopDesk evangelist.

via Scoble

A few days ago I posted a link on where to get some advice from the big guys. Today we have some advice from a small business wannabe.

Jason Pettus has two posts on the Fast Company blog (part 1, part 2) with some advice for those who are trying to launch their own business.

Fred Wilson discusses the death of a web service when it appears that the Bloglet service is shut down. He has more than 1000 subscribers who are not getting updates and he now faces manuy hours of re-entering the data manually. Sounds like a good microISV opportunity to me.

WorkHappy.net has posted a number of “Happy Links” for all of the current and aspiring business owners out there.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have Larry Page (Google founder), Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start), and Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) advise you during the startup of your microISV? Well, here ya’ go. The Stanford Technology Ventures Program Educators Center has video clips, case studies, and course materials of high tech entrepreneurship resources available for free.

via Lifehacker

Alex King, founder of King Design, who has produced Tasks (a web based task management app) and Feedlounge (a web based RSS reader) gives us his thoughts on offering support as a microISV business owner. He has made the choice to not offer free phone support but instead focuses his time on adding features and keeping the price of his software down.

Many people go into business as a microISV with the idea of creating a software product that will allow them to leave their day job and spend their days doing whatever it is they want to do. Often times, the reality quickly becomes days filled with tech support and no time left over to do what you had planned. Alex and Nick Bradbury are two people who have become excellent examples of allowing customers to help themselves and also allowing customers to help each other. This may cause some headaches because offering forums and other open support options can allow customers to air some of your dirty laundry, but in the end your openness will be seen as a benefit and will probably produce more sales.

Sean Mountcastle has posted his notes from the recent Business for Geeks tutorial at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The talk was given by Marc Hedlund, O’Reilly’s entrepreneur in residence. Marc appeared to really push the microISV concept of starting small, keeping your day job, and bootstrapping but that only scratches the surface of the things he touched on.

If anyone else attended, I’d be interested in hearing your experiences in the comments.

I came across this article about the winner of Entreprenuer magazine’s Ugliest Logo Contest and the article itself is interesting but its also a great piece of marketing for the company redesigning the ugliest logo.

By providing the redesign in this contest, LogoWorks gets advertising in a national magazine that doesn’t even seem like advertising. The author also points out the benefits of using LogoWorks’ service which will provide several concepts within 72 hours for a very affordable price ranging from $265 to $549.

Now we just need to see some microISV products getting similar attention. Who has some ideas?

David St. Lawrence, author of the blog Ripples and the book Danger Quicksand - Have a Nice Day, has posted the first entry in a series on starting a micro-business. I have been reading David’s work for quite some time and he always has something insightful and interesting to say. I’m looking forward to the rest of this series.

If you are in the process of setting up your website to accept orders for your software or are interested in reading about using ShareIt for your sales, you’ll want to read Dennis Gurock’s experience of setting up shop for his SmartInspect software.

Will Shipley, the founder of the company responsible for Delicious Library, gave a talk to a group of students about creating successful software. He has posted his slides from the talk that are very funny, full of insight, and show you how you can drive a really cool car. He highlights a lot of reasons to develop for the Mac as opposed to the Windows platform and he even guarantees success if you follow his advice.

Related posts: Coffee Shop Software

submitted by Justin Van Patten

Jeff Sandquist points out that Microsoft has now released the Shareware Starter Kit. The starter kit uses the .Net Framework 2.0 and downloads are available for C#, VB, and C++.

From Dan Fernandez:

The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample application of the common features in all shareware applications. You can easily modify, extend and integrate these into your own applications. The Channel9 guys even have a contest where you can write code to use the Shareware Starter Kit and code your way to a free ticket to the PDC.

A lot has been said recently about Microsoft moving into SMB market but by releasing things like the Shareware Starter Kit shows me that they are committed to developers and partners even more than before.

To follow up the previous post, Nick and Newsgator have decided to not use the subscription model for FeedDemon, as they had previously announced, based on customer feedback.

I’m sure this was a trying week over at Newsgator but we should all be so lucky to have such vocal customers. Coca-Cola would have paid good money for this type of feedback before they introduced New Coke.