Later this week I’ll start the process of closing my start-up, aDeVIX Software. After months of planning and development, the decision has finally been made to call it a day. It was a great idea, but time and money conspired against us, with great effect.
We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.
We planned the design, the marketing, the budget (even allowing for snacks & drinks), covered every detail, but when you don’t have the time to write code, or the money to pay people to write it for you; no amount of planning will help. We then delayed, then came up with smaller, simpler products, then scrapped all that and went back to the original idea.
Months of work, thousands of dollars in various expenses, and not a single dime as income; much effort, no reward. Many thousand lines of code, a few websites, countless meetings, and enough notes to account for the clearing of a small forest; but no money, no assets of value, nothing. It’s a bit painful to think about all the effort, and see that it was all for not.
It’s certainly possible to make an ISV work, it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Can you afford the expenses? Do you have the time? Will you be able to support the product yourself until it brings in enough money to hire people?
In some ways though, I’m happy that this is done, as it now leaves me free of any potential conflict of interest when it comes to pursuing future opportunities.
I love what I do, and I work with a great team. While it’s still far from perfect; I can say that I do love my job. For the last couple weeks though, I’ve had to remind myself of this several times. I’m sure we’ve all done it, in this industry it’s hard to avoid. You read an email or receive a phone call and repeat the mantra “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.
The last release of YAWAST was on January 1, 2020; while the release history was sometimes unpredictable, the goal was a new release each month with new features and bug fixes. I intentionally took January off from the project. In February, I left the company I was at; the team of penetration testers there had helped to inspire new features while looking for ways to make them more productive. But something else happened in February, an issue was opened – something that appeared to be simple, but in fact, made me realize that the entire project was in doubt.
For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off.
I have a project coming up that will require some iOS development – which means that it has to be done on a Mac. Seeing as I didn’t own a Mac, and as the more I spent on acquiring one, the less money from this project will end up in my pocket; I needed a cheap solution. In the end I acquired a very nice 13″ MacBook from CowBoom.com; so this is both about the deals that are available and a review of my experience with the seller.
It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had been invested into finding a pattern, but none was forthcoming.
