Project Anvil

In various books, articles and writings on building a software business you may hear from time to time that for small businesses, you should find a pain YOU have and solve that. The theory is that if you have the pain and can solve it, you will have a great product others will want to buy.

I hate to tell you this, but that's false. Well, more to the point, its an incomplete thought. What really should be said is that you need to find a pain point you have that many other potential customers ALSO have; and the size of that market will be a gage to determine if there is a real business opportunity for you or not.

Think about it for a second. If you were a colour blind coder with only your right hand, it might make sense to make software to make your life easier. But if you wanted to make money at it, how many colour blind, right handed people are out there that can really use your product? Not too many. So you either have to have something amazing you can charge a small group of people a lot of money for, or consider that perhaps its not a good business opportunity to pursue. You definitely will NOT make it up in volume.

So when looking at what sort of project you may want to work on, you need to be looking at your CUSTOMER'S pain. You should be looking for pain points where the customer would be more than happy to throw money at you if you can solve their problem. And if you find the right pain point, it will hopefully have a substantive market size so that you can benefit from that. At the same time though, its important that this pain point be strong enough that people are willing to pay for a solution. If it just annoys them, or they are willing to live with it, its much more difficult to determine if a market exists or not for the product.

As a small software company I also look for another key element in determining project feasibility that I want you to consider. Does the project fit in a scalable vertical where you can OWN or DOMINATE it? I would rather be the #1 software company in a specific market segment than the #10 one in a wide market, even if that market is 20 times the size of mine. Why? At some point you will want to differentiate your business from the others, and focus your limited marketing and sales resources where you can get the best returns. Fishing in a big lake with 50 other anglers is much more difficult that having a small pond all to yourself. That means you have the potential to "catch" more, and in the end that means you may make more money. Of course, its also nice since you don't have big software companies coming in to compete with you. It's typically not worth their time. Where you and I may think 1 or 2 million in revenue potential is nice for an opportunity, someone like Microsoft or IBM may feel its just not worth their time. And that is a great opportunity for you.

So why am I telling you all this? Because in the next post, I am going to talk about MY customers, and their pain points so you can see why "Project Anvil" is something I believe is important, at least to Scorpion Software. Understanding your customers and their pain can go a long way to building a healthy relationship, which will in turn net you more revenue potential.

And before worrying about writing a single line of code, we need to know that its worth our time to do so.