When thinking about future development plans you need to take technical as well as the market demands into account. We know that WinForms is no longer being actively developed by Microsoft and so the a long slow decline in sales of WinForms components can be expected. WPF is the new desktop story with little brother Silverlight being heavily pushed for RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Does that mean all WinForms development is now a waste of time? Should I stop developing WinForms components/controls immediately?

Far from it, just think of the existing WinForms installed base as well as the huge number of .NET developers that have achieved technical competence in that technology. Few companies can afford to rewrite applications in WPF just because it’s now flavor of the month. Besides, when it comes to line of business applications WinForms is perfectly acceptable. No doubt WPF will become more and more compelling for new projects but it has yet to become de facto for new desktop apps.

We can use the handy Good Trends service to check out the relative popularity of different keywords. If we assume there is some rough correlation between keyword searching and actual technology usage we get the following…

We can see the WPF trend moving steadily upwards as WinForms usage switches over. More interesting is the Silverlight trend. Despite being the new kid on the block we can see it’s already very popular and the upward trend is much steeper than for WPF. Of the two technologies it seems that Silverlight is where the interest and action is going to be.
Silverlight vs Flash

As Silverlight is judged to be in competition to Flash, whether Microsoft choose to admit it or not, it might be handy to compare them. Doing so gives us the following rather sobering graph…

Clearly Silverlight is not going to replace Flash in the immediate future. Then again any new technology for developing rich sites is always going to be in a minority for many years to come. I cannot imagine Facebook, MySpace, New York Times etc becoming Flash/Silverlight. I can see that any small startup is going to be tempted by the ease of outputting simple HTML pages rather than building an RIA as the first iteration. So maybe RIA is destined to be limited to business applications and niche areas.
Silverlight vs Adobe Flex

A fairer comparison might be Silverlight and the Adobe Flex environment as that truly represents the actual development competition. In that case things look a little brighter…

Things are pretty even here and it could be some time before a clear leader emerges.
Conclusion

As a component vendor what strategy can be we take away from this? First of all I think there is still some mileage in WinForms for two reasons. First is the large installed base and existing knowledge base that means many projects will continue to use it for many years to come. Second is the advantage of being a small one man vendor. A legacy development base would still provide enough income to make a respectable living for a lone wolf like myself, although it only represents executive wash room costs for the big vendors. So I intend to be actively developing Krypton for some time yet. Indeed my next major burst of coding will be adding the much delayed docking windows capability.

Long term I still need to get involved in the Silverlight/WPF market. From the above analysis it seems that targeting Silverlight should be the priority. The fact WPF uses essentially the same framework means that with care the same code base could be used to create WPF versions of the same components. I will use my limited spare time to play around with Silverlight and think about ideas for components that would add value for RIA scenarios.

Although the sale started on the 1st April I decided to wait until the 2nd before adding a blog entry. I didn’t want people to think it was some sort of twisted April Fool’s Joke. I will post a forum message and notify my list of email subscribers in order to spread the message far and wide. I suspect the email list is where most extra sales will come from, if there are any, as it represents a large pool of developers that have not bought but expressed an interest at some point in the past

In order to make this work I need to increase the number of orders by 33% in order to cover the fact each sales is worth 25% less. Anything above 33% represents an actually benefit from having a sale. I will let you know at the end of the month how it works out.

I also think that developer blogs are another way to reach many potential customers. So I’ve decided to make an offer to both those camps in the hope it will drive greater awareness of Krypton and in the long run generate some extra sales.

If you fall into either category then please email me and we can set you up with a free copy. Here is the link to the website page describing the criteria…

Free offer criteria

If you can think of any other groups that should qualify then feel free to leave a comment.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/

The free Krypton Toolkit is the main marketing channel for Component Factory. By offering a free library of professional controls I hope that word of mouth will spread the company name and knowledge of our commercial controls. But not all developers will stumble across the Toolkit or have it recommended by a friend.

My second channel for reaching developers is the use of Google Adwords. I have been using AdWords for over six months and it definitely helps reach developers that would otherwise never have downloaded the Toolkit. By setting up the conversion tracking I can see exactly how much it costs to get each new downloader and then compare this with the average sales value of a download. By keeping the first less than the second I know that it generates positive revenue.

This week we now have a third channel up and working, our first reseller offering the Krypton components for purchase. ComponentSource.com is the largest online reseller of developer components and will reach another group of purchasing developers that would not otherwise have heard of Krypton. You can check out my product listing by clicking this image….

By having three different ways of reaching the target audience I hope to keep expanding the already large community of developers using Krypton Toolkit in their projects.

Regular readers will know that Component Factory is just a one man and his dog sized outfit (actually I don’t even have a dog). We are the canonical example of a micro-ISV, the term coined by Eric Sink a couple of years ago to describe a single person company that develops Microsoft based software.

In fact since he invented the term there has been a whole community of developers emerge under this tag. Many reside on the The Business of Software forum run by Joel Spolsky. You can even get a book that explains the process of going from regular developer to micro-ISV company called Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. So if you’re thinking of making the jump yourself I would highly recommend you get the book and hang around with others in the same situation on the forum.

Of course, being a one man outfit is just a stepping towards the megacorp status and NASDAQ listing that is our destiny. But until that day arrives I need to find an effective way of outsourcing tasks that are outside my expertise. In fact not just for tasks that need alternative skills but also for tasks that would otherwise take up a great deal of my time. The most valuable commodity a micro-ISV has is time. I only have a limited number of hours available per week and I need to get maximum value from them. So if I need a new website design I want a professional graphic designer to work on it, or if I need a Unix server setup then I want someone with those skills. Trying to do it myself is either beyond my ability or will take too long to get up to speed.

So how do you outsource small tasks? If you want to outsource a major chunk of work you can hire a contractor to work with you, but this only works if you have several months of work to offer. Not many full time contractors want to take on a 2 day or 2 week project. So you need micro-Outsourcing and I found a great service recently called oDesk that offers such a service.

Like many such sites you can specify a project and wait for providers to put themselves forward and quote for the work. But unlike most sites they are not bidding a fixed price for the work but instead they are quoting their hourly rate. This is much more realistic in my opinion. Once you have interviewed and accepted a provider you then work with them on the task and they get paid according to the number of hours they work on the project.

But for me the killer feature with oDesk is that the provider has to run some software that periodically takes a snapshot of their screen. So when your account says they have spent five hours on the project you can see screen shots of the work they were doing for that entire time. So you can be assured they really did the work they say they did. As my provider is designing a new website for me it means I can see all the different ideas they work on as they go through the design process. I can email the provider and say I loved the idea they did initially but am less keen on the one later that they actually emailed to me. This combination of being able to contract small tasks and be assured on the work performed is ideal.

They seem to have a wide range of providers ranging from web designers to PHP programmers. I can imagine over time assembling a useful set of providers used for a few hours work from time to time. Ideal for a micro-ISV.

Actually this is a very simple piece of marketing what would usually be called product placement. So how does it work?

The vast majority of sales for component software are made to companies and not individual developers. There maybe the odd sale to a lone hobbyist from time to time but basically it is businesses that buy component libraries and especially the multi-developer licences that generate the big bucks.

The vast majority of blogs about .NET are written by individual developers. How many of those bloggers would have bought a copy had they not been given one? The answer will be close to zero because either they would never have paid for the software at all or they would have already bought it anyway (or the company they work for would have bought it).

So the actual lost revenue to Crownwood is virtually, and might actually be, zero. Remember that the cost of giving away a $399 copy of software to someone that would never have paid for it anyway is actually $0. There is no CD to burn or postage to pay. The cost of letting someone download an installation file is essentially zero.

So in return for almost zero cost they get their company and product name in front of hundreds and probably thousands of .NET developers. And if they get really lucky maybe someone like Scoble will put a mention on his blog and suddenly they have 10 times the normal traffic to check out their website. How much would you normally pay for that kind of marketing?

It’s just simple product placement. If your a Radio DJ you get heaps of free stuff sent to you. Why? Because the company in question is just hoping you mention their product once on a popular radion station. I think more of this will happen in the future for popular bloggers.

This is the first post in over a week because I have been knocking up an application to manage customers and serial keys. Rather than try to find and buy an off the self solution I thought it would be easier to just create exactly what I need myself. Like most programmers I prefer the feely of complete control that comes from writing it to do exactly what I need myself.

It can import sales information directly from an SWREG report or connect to directly to Microsoft Outlook and scan for the sale notification emails. As well as updating the sales database it will generate any required outgoing emails.

So if an order for a 4 Navigator licence arrives it will automatically generate and send out the three additional serial keys (the first one is sent directly by SWREG at the time the order is completed). It has all the usual features you would expect in order to make life easier, the ability to search based on order numbers, email addresses etc.

I can leave it running overnight or over a weekend when I am away and know that the additional emails are being generated. This gives me a high degree of automation, I have Outlook and my internal application up and running at startup and know that my database and emails are taking care of themselves.

This is really important as a small ISV, make sure you automate just about anything you can. That way your not spending time on daily manual tasks and instead can concentrate on the important stuff, like adding features!

The only feature missing that I need is the ability to send reminders at the end of the 12 month subscription period, but I can leave that until closer to the anniversary of the first sale!

So why am I explaining this straight forward application that is no use to anyone else? Well I used Krypton to build the user interface in order to ensure that it really does work as expected in a real world scenario.

During the process I found the ‘anchor not working for controls inside KryptonGroup/KryptonHeaderGroup’ bug. It also gives me more of an insight into the pain points in developing a typical client application.

Now back to the real business of fixing the list of bugs reported for the 2.0 release. As some are quite critical it might be worth issuing a new release that just contains the bug fixes but without any new functionality.

You might think I was busy writing code or perhaps maybe a project plan for the next few months. Nope, actually I have been spending 8 hours per day learning to touch type.

Like most programmers my typing speed is pretty good considering I bash away without any systematic approach. But over the years it has really annoyed me having to keep looking down at the keyboard all the time. Not to mention the high percentage of mistakes that I make.

Learning to touch type is not that hard but it does require a few days of solid training before you can start using the method all the time. Plus I expect I will be coding at less than a quarter the normal speed for the first week. It might take a few weeks to get back up to the old typing output.

This drop off in output is not something most employers would be very happy about, but one of the advantages of working for yourself is the lack of a boss to worry about. Once those frustrating first few weeks are out of the way the improved top speed and productivity will last a lifetime.

If your thinking of the same idea then I can recommend the little package I am using that only cost $19.95 Typing Master.

I need to take a rest now, it has taken me 30 minutes of sweat inducing effort to touch type this post!

Market Disruption

WPF does not represent an evolution of the existing technology used to develop user interfaces but instead a revolution. Moving from .NET 1.1 Windows Forms to .NET 2.0 Windows Forms represents an evolution and a welcome one at that. But WPF is a completely different way of developing with a learning curve that brings everyone back down to the same starting point.

This completely disrupts the market for .NET user interface components. You cannot just upgrade your existing component code and add a couple of new features to keep it up-to-date. If you want to develop controls for WPF then you are starting from ground zero.

The clock is ticking on the revenues that your existing Window Forms components will generate. This is hardly surprising as all technology is superseded at some point but until WPF was revealed we did not know when it would happen. But now we can look ahead and predict very easily what will happen.

I think I am safe in saying that in 10 years time everyone doing .NET windows development will be using WPF. In fact we can move the prediction ahead and say that in 5 years I think it will be true also. So how much nearer can we predict? How about in 3 years time or even just 2 years?

I do not know the exact release date for WPF but I think it will be about the end of this year. The exact timing does not really matter that much when looking at the market over the next few years, a month or quarter either way is no big deal.

Once the technology is released I think it will take at least a year before companies starting a new project decide to use it as the front end technology of choice. Some bleeding edge developers will jump into using it straight away but most managers are cautious about a new technology.

So we are one year away from its release. Two years from now it will be getting a good percentage of new projects using it and in three years it will be adopted as a matter of course. Therefore any revenue you have for Windows Forms components is going to start declining one year from now. Two years from now the revenue is going to be a significantly down and declining rapidly. In three years you will need to be selling WPF components or starting to look for another job.

Look back at what has happened to the market for ActiveX/COM components. Although some are still sold to those still using VC++ the sales are minor compared to the money spent on .NET components. If anything the transition to WPF components will be even faster because the transition from Win32/VC++ to .NET was a greater leap than that from Windows Forms to WPF. After all, WPF is still using .NET.

The Levelling Effect

Whenever there is a big change in a market it also represents a big opportunity. Take as an example the component suite market. Take the position of Developer Express as compared to the market leader of Infragistics.

The first disadvantage for Developer Express is only having half the number of developers of the market leader and so they are constrained by resources. Man for man they need to be twice as effective in order to maintain the same development pace as the Infragistics team. A second disadvantage is that Infragistics already have many more components than Developer Express does. If Developer Express wants to appear as an equal player in the market they need the same breadth of components and so need to catch up. They need to sprint with only half the staff to catch up.

Now let’s press the market reset button by introducing WPF. Disadvantage number two has completely disappeared because both companies are starting from a clean slate. The problem of fewer resources is certainly not insurmountable. A smaller team that is highly motivated and talented can outstrip the productivity of a much larger team.

If I was Developer Express and my ambition was to compete with Infragistics as a suite vendor then I would put all my existing .NET and VCL components into maintenance mode. All my best developers would be spending their time mastering WPF and ensuring that the team can develop and release components at the same tempo as Infragistics.

So my advice to Developer Express, ComponentOne, Syncfusion, and any other vendor looking to play ball with Infragistics is to master WPF as soon as possible. Make sure that when WPF is released your out of the traps like a whippet because if they get ahead of you, its game over until the next technology reset.

First Mover Advantage

For a full description of first mover advantage you can use this link to wikipedia. If you think back to the days of the dot com bubble you will probably remember that many of the companies based their entire business model on first mover advantage. They viewed the internet like a land grab, the first company to offer a particular service was just bound to dominate and make most of the money.

Looking back it is obvious this approach is far from fool proof. Amazon was not the first book seller online and depending on which account you read was either the 3rd or the 7th. Either way it was certainly not the first. Google was hardly the first search engine but look at it now.

If you’re a high street retailer then having the very best location on the street is a great first mover advantage. No rival can do much about that. So if there are scarce resources then being a first mover can be a big advantage. But resources on the internet are almost limitless. Anyone can register a domain name and the cost of hosting a moderate server farm is not that great. You can always hire some smart developers and have a spiffy looking website up in no time.

The only real advantage you gain with respect to the internet is in markets that have a network effect. This is best described with an example. In the UK there is a website called www.friendsreunited.co.uk that allows people to find old school friends and find out what they have been up to. Now there is really only room for one website to do this as no one wants to logon to several different sites. So once they had a core group of users then everyone else just migrates to that one location.

So will first mover advantage apply to the WPF market? I think the answer is both yes and no. If you are an established number one player in your category then I think it makes sense to be the first to market. Try and ensure that no one has a reason to switch over to an alternative supplier.

Let’s consider the position of our favourite example Infragistics. They have a dominant position and substantial revenues from subscription renewals. Their priority must be to ensure that do not give any of their customers an excuse to switch over to someone else. So they must be quickly into the market and establish themselves again as the provider of the broadest range of components.

Hence my previous belief that the best chance for the other suite vendors is to quickly get into the market and use the levelling effect described above to try and attack that dominant position. I would use the same advice to any dominant player in the more specialised categories. So SoftwareFX and Dundas in the charting category should quickly move to maintain their positions as leaders in that area.

What about the rest of the vendors that are either minor players in their market or just starting out like me? In that case I would suggest they consider using the second mover advantage instead.

Second Mover Advantage

For a description of second mover advantage use this link, again from wikipedia. This is not a term that most people will have come across but is actually a very good strategy for many technology based companies.

Until now we have suggested that Developer Express et al try to quickly establish themselves in the WPF market to counter Infragistics. But what if they feel they just cannot manage it on the scale required. Instead they could deliberately not enter the market and wait to see what Infragistics does with the first release of their own offering.

By examining the Infragistics components they can learn all about the architecture and design decisions that Infragistics have taken and improve upon this with their own set of ideas and innovations. So although they are behind in terms of time to market they have a superior product that has leveraged the research and development effort of the leading competitor.

This approach is particularly appealing if you are just starting out or are a small player in a market you want to attack. You can leapfrog the capabilities of your competition. Now in theory you would expect the other company to respond by improving their own product and so begin a feature lead arms war.

What is interesting about Infragistics is that they do not tend to make big investments in improving their existing products. Oh, they do tweak and add the occasional feature but they will not completely rewrite a major component. If you came out tomorrow with a fundamentally better grid control that they could not match without redesigning the whole of their own grid, it is unlikely they would respond.

Final Strategy

I expect the WPF market for .NET user interface components to develop in the following way.

Infragistics will be keen to retain all their existing subscribers and defend their dominant market position by releasing as early as possible to the market and develop a broad set of components. Don’t let any of those subscription holders defect!

Other suite vendors will take one of two strategies. I expect most to release early in the hope of matching Infragistics component for component in an effort to increase their market share. Others, if they have the financial resources, will wait and leverage the research and development of the early releasers in order to leapfrog and bring superior technical solutions to the market later.

In the specialist categories I would expect the market leaders to also release early for the same reasons that Infragistics will do in the suite market. The smaller players will probably split between the two approaches but many will not even have thought about strategy.

Component Factory is going to take the second mover approach and deliberately wait for others to release products before designing the architecture of our own. Obviously I will be learning WPF and thinking about lots of ideas of how to create some compelling components. But the final design for them will wait until I can learn from and take advantage of the ideas others have come up with.

So what will I do for the next year or so until the time comes for serious WPF development? That time will be spent between mastering WPF and developing good old .NET2 Windows Forms controls. Although WPF is the next big wave there is still life in the old Windows Forms dog yet.

Sources of Information

Not being an accountant it took a little while before I worked out how to discover the two key pieces of information I wanted to know per company. Most of the companies are based in America and they are all privately owned. Luckily a little investigation revealed that the cheapest and quickest approach was to use the credit checking service from Dun and Bradstreet.

I used the cheapest option they offer which reveals just the turnover and number of employees for any private company based in America. If you are willing to pay more than you can get a wealth of information about a company including its past financial and credit history.

Component Suite Vendors

Before giving the numbers we have to be careful to note that the numbers are only a snapshot of the last figures released. They are useful for getting an idea of the relative size of turnover and number of employees, but financial numbers tend to vary and these may be a little out of date.

The results for the suite vendors were as follows:-

Employees/Revenue/Company
70 $17.4m Infragistics
35 $_3.0m Developer Express
12 $_0.4m Syncfusion
(unknown) ComponentOne

The Dun and Bradstreet source was unable to give any details for ComponentOne but the other three companies have some interesting results. We can clearly see that Infragistics are the number one in the market and also achieve an execellent level of revenue per employee.

Number 2 in our list is Developer Express, they have a healthy revenue but are making less than half the amount per employee of Infragistics. I would guess that Infragistics are making a nice profit and that Developer Express are making a small profit or breaking even.

If the numbers for Syncfusion are accurate then they are in pretty dire straits. The revenue they are pulling in is about enough to support 3 developers but with 12 they must be losing money hand over fist.

Syncfusion are an interesting case because they only started up 2 or 3 years ago as a set of developers that used to work on the Stingray set of controls aimed at C++ developers. I always thought the advertising they used was very poor and looked unprofessional. Combined with nothing in their set of components that actually stands out from the crowd and you can see why they are struggling to stay alive.

So can we estimate the size of the suite market? I would guess that the revenue for ComponentOne is about the same as Developer Express as they seem to be positioned at the same level on the ‘best sellers’ chart of www.ComponentSource.com. Adding up all the numbers gives us $17.4m + $3m + $3m + 0.4m = $23.4m.

If we add on a little for the smaller players and take into account the released figures are behind the current value we could pick a value of say $25m as a fair guide. We don’t need to be completely accurate, just a rough idea of the scale is enough.

We can conclude that Infragistics has the dominant position with 70% of the market, Developer Express and ComponentOne have 12% each and the rest is split between odds and sods.

Clearly we do not want to be entering this market. A company with the resources of 1 full time developer against a market leader with 70 and the other two players with about 35 each does not represent an oppourtunity.

Specialised Market Vendors

Charting
Employees/Revenue/Company
26 $3.0m SoftwareFX
_4 $0.6m Graphics Server
Dundas (unknown)

Grid
Employees/Revenue/Company
30 $4.4m Data Dynamics
20 $3.0m FarPoint Technologies

Now these results are more interesting. I have not tried to include every single vendor for each of these two categories but instead the bigger well known ones. For the charting area I tried to get the figures for Dundas but was unable to get the cheap report that I was willing to pay for. I would guess they are only slightly behind SoftwareFX in size.

If seems that to be a big player in one of these categories you need to be at a scale of around $3-4m and therefore will have around 20-30 employees. Each category also seems to have room for a couple of big players followed by a few smaller companies.

Conclusions

Stay away from the market for creating a whole suite as it has a dominant player that is making a profit margin way above anyone else. To compete against Infragistics you need not just superior technical components but also deep pockets to try and match the level of marketing and exposure they are currently buying.

Each category seems able to support a couple of leading providers and although the value of these specialised markets is smaller than the suites it is still significant. At least it is compared to being a one man and his dog outfit like myself.

The leaders in the existing categories are well established and have good domain knowledge and so completing head on will be very difficult unless I have something that is obviously a magnitude better.

Instead I conclude the best approach is to not compete head on with any of the existing vendors. Instead we need to either create a completely new category or at least have a significantly different approach to any existing vendor. We need to develop a reputation for excellence in one area and ensure that we have many features that are just not present in any other product. So if you want the cool features then you have to buy ours because you just cannot get it anywhere else.

So that will be our broad approach. a laser like focus in an area for which we will build a reputation as the area leader. Plus ensuring we innovate in that area so that there is no way to substitute another vendor’s product in place of our own. We do not want to compete on price but on capability.

Does that sound reasonable or do you read the market differently? This is your chance to provide feedback and prevent me falling into any obvious traps that you can see ahead!

Market Definition

First off we need to define the market that I will be competing in. A broad definition would be the market for component software. But this is a very broad definition and includes everything from Java to ASP.NET and much more besides.

We can quickly narrow this down this definition as I am only interested in targeting the .NET developer community. Within this market I would define three distinct segments. We have Windows Forms, ASP.NET and other. The ‘other’ covers a mish mash of areas such as communications software, encryption components and the like.

As you will already know from the release of the Krypton Toolkit, I am very much focused in the Windows Forms segment of the broader .NET component market. But this segment can be broken down further.

It is not a clear cut separation but you can split Windows Forms into several categories. You have Charting, Grids, Reporting, Toolbars, Docking and others. In this case the ‘others’ includes a spectrum of varied controls.

Also I would include another category called Suites. These are the bundles you get that include all the controls you should ever need. Each suite is different and so direct comparison between them is not always easy. In addition some of the individual components in the suite can be purchased on their own.

The Players

To get a feel for the market we need to look at each significant category and find out who the major players are. I am only going to include the bigger players in the larger categories.

Remember we are only trying to get a feel for it and making exhaustive lists of everything will not, in my opinion, add to the overall feel for the market. We don’t want to hide the forest for the trees!

Grids
Janus Systems
FarPoint Technologies

Charting
Dundas
Software FX
Graphics Server

Reporting
Business Objects
Data Dynamics

Suites
Infragistics
Developer Express
ComponentOne
Syncfusion

Each of the entries in the Suites category could also be included in the individual categories such as Charting as well but for the sake of brevity I have only placed the cross-category entries in Suites category.
Menus/Toolbars

Initial Observations

I have not used all the different products by all the component vendors listed above but I have enough knowledge and feel for the market to make one interesting observation. The companies that specialise in just a single category have superior products to that comparable ones offered by the suite vendors.

The Dundas, SoftwareFX chart controls are better than the charts offered by any of the suites. This is not entirely surprising as a company focused purely on the one area is likely to attain a greater depth of knowledge and feature set than a suite that has a comparatively wide focus.

So if you want the best reporting control you might well go for the popular Crystal Reports from Business Objects. If you need a top notch charting ability you might buy ChartFX from SoftwareFX. If you need a grid that can do just about anything that Excel can then you pick up Spread from FarPoint technologies.

But if you do not need the best of breed then you might well go for the a suite that costs the same as a single component from one of the other specialised categories. By far the most popular suite is from Infragistics and it covers just about every sort of control you could need in an application.

First Conclusion

We need to decide the ground we are going to occupy as a company. There available options would seem to be something like:-

1) Create a broad spectrum suite
2) Specialise in an existing category
3) Specialise and create a new category

Within each of these options we also have to decide if we are going to attempt to be a leader and sell based on having the superior functionality. Or just become generic and sell based on price and so just match the same broad functionality available in most of the rivals.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the choices you think I should make. I already have a pretty firm idea of what I will be doing but if everyone else comes up with a different answer then I will have to re-evaluate.

To anybody else the end of January is just another month passing. To me it is a complete change in my life. From wage slave to free man. From security and steady hours to a life of adrenaline filled adventure. Well maybe that is a slight exaggeration but you know what I mean.

Once I am working for myself full time I will be able to blog more regularly. The primary purpose of the blog is to provide detailed and regular information on the technical work going on with occasional updates about the microISV itself.

So users of the free Krypton Toolkit will be able to see the new features being added and bugs being fixed in almost real time. They can then provide feedback via comments or direct email to suggest additions in the area I am working on that will help them in their projects. They will be able to plan ahead knowing what additions are coming up in the next release.

But until the end of the month you will have to manage on a meagre diet of general blog entries. Thin gruel for you hardcore techies but I will try to spice it up with a couple of interesting observations about the component library market and software management.

Now if you’re expecting a story about how someone dropped a paint pot on my head like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy movie, then you’re wrong. Nothing has ever hit me from walking under a ladder. But maybe the bad karma is catching up with me.

Last year was a bad one. I had chicken pox, food poisoning and the flu when normally I am unlucky if I catch a mild cold in the winter. One of the budgies died and then my xmas holiday was cancelled by the boss at work, because of the need to make an important end of year deadline on a project.

Just to top it off I was burgled just two weeks before xmas. Luckily they only took items that were easy to carry away, 3 laptops, 2 mobile phones, a heap of DVD’s and a few other odds and sods. I say lucky because none of the laptops had data on that I needed and nothing had any sentimental value.

So all in all I glad to see the back of 2005. I do not normally believe in luck, karma or any kind of superstition. But if there is such a thing then I’m expecting to get some payback this year.

My experience so far also indicates that you tend to write a higher quality of code. When you know that your income will depend on the quality of what you create it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Instead of being happy to produce good code, now the only benchmark that makes me happy is great code. It has to be just right.

Of course, what is considered good or great is subjective. My great code might be only average from your point of view and visa versa. But the important point is that you are writing code at the limit of your ability and would be happy to be judged by it.

The down side to being a lone developer is that you have no one to turn to when you get stuck. If you have a tricky decision to make there is no one to bounce ideas off, no alternative point of view to attack a problem with. But there is a solution of sorts.

I have just enrolled on the Microsoft ISV Buddy program. This is a scheme from Microsoft that pairs you up with a developer inside Microsoft, giving you a direct line to an internal developer. Even if they cannot answer the problem themselves, they probably know someone else who can.

If your developing for .NET and working either on your own or in an ISV then I recommend you give it a try. Here is the link…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/isvbuddy/default.aspx

I am still not very happy with the ideas they have produced and maybe that is the risk of using a cheap company. You get what you pay for.

Judge for yourself. Here they are….

I purchased for just $50 a PHP news/blogging package that adds the full capability to my website. It only took about 30 lines of PHP added to the blogging webpage and it was all up and working. It even includes a nice little html editor for adding new posts and users can add their own comments.

Now I could have tried to do the same thing with ASP.NET but I can just imagine the time it would have taken. I am all in favour of ‘eat your own dog food’ but my microISV is intended to create windows forms controls and not web technology. So I think I made the right choice in going for the quick and cheap option.

Of course, the rest of the site looks a little barren as there is no other content apart from the blogging posts. But one step at a time!

As outlined previously, the Krypton Toolkit and Krypton Navigator product logos are a bit mediocre. We obviously want to ensure that all the visuals used on the website and in the products are excellent and not just mediocre.

So as usual, we are going to pay a designer to come up with something much better. In the past we have used Guru.com for the main company logo and DesignOutpost.com for the website template.

Both of these websites have produced some great results although you have to be willing to push the designers quite hard in the right direction.

Rent-A-Coder

This time we are going to try another side called RentACoder.com. Despite the name they have plenty of designers that are happy to work on logos.

I have started a project on the site and asked for bidders to come forward to take part in the project. The ceiling price I have established is just $150, which is pretty skinny for creating a couple of professional logos. Still, if you live in the middle of Tibet and want this as extra income outside the main day job then maybe that is quite tempting.

After a couple of days I have had over 30 bidders come forward, bidding anything from $30 up to $100 for doing the project. Many of these are obviously automated answers because the replies have not taken into account the project requirements that I requested. Never mind, that leaves plenty of others to choose from.

Some good news at last. The web hosting has been transferred over much faster than I expected and now I have a Linuxmachine hosting my web space space. The domain names are correctly pointing to it and email is still working just fine. It was a painful process with several calls to Network Solutions, but we got their in the end.

In fact you can visit the site right now and see the newly designed website up and running. Well, actually there is only a single page with example non-sense content but it gives the look and feel.

www.componentfactory.com

The observant among you will have noticed that one of the navigation buttons is called Blog. I am getting the web designer to setup a blog system that works within the website so there is no need to have it externally hosted as with Blogger.

Once that is working I will copy across all existing posts from here and let you know the appropriate new feed. But I expect this to take a little while yet.

…the Bad…

It seems that my order for a new PC with Dell is going to take another two weeks. When I placed the order the delivery time estimated seemed a reasonable 10 days. But once they have received payment it suddenly jumps by another 14 days. Not that I am cynical of course…

…and the Ugly…

As part of the website design I need a couple of small logos that are used to represent the two products. Have a look and see what you think.

The Toolkit will be the free set of components that will help market the company name and drive interest in the other products. Navigator will be the first actual paid for product.

As the products created will be related to each other it makes sense to have a name for the range they all belong to. Obviously you have now worked out that I have decided on the name Krypton. Hence the green colouring and not the blue you might expect for it to match the website.

What do you think of the name? Do you think the above logos are good enough?

Things have been moving very slowing recently.

At the moment I am still in the middle of transferring my hosting package from a Windows machine to a Unix machine. As a result my domain names are not working and so the images on the blog are still not showing. The images are in a directory on the server and referenced from the blog. Fortunately my email is not effected.

Website Design Progress

I have an initial cut of the website design. It looks great and once the hosting is sorted out I will put it online so you can see how it looks. Might be a few days before that is possible.

This might sound odd but sometimes it is really hard to pay people. The designer that came up with the design has done a good job. So on receiving the design I immediately requested how to pay him in order to reward his hard work. Three days later and another email and still no response. Sometimes it is hard to give money away!

Visual Studio Problems

Another problem I am having is with my development machine. Because it has XP Home Edition installed it means I cannot install the latest CTP builds of Visual Studio .NET 2005.

This is a pain as it means I am developing against a version that might have since changed. I don’t expect many changes to have occurred but I would feel more comfortable making sure I am not writing code now that will definitely have to be replaced.

Another issue is the inability to see my controls at design time. No matter how I try to install Visual Studio .NET 2005 it seems to be screwed up, and refuses to work at design time. So I can only work on the features I can use at run time.

14 Days and counting

Luckily the end of all my problems is in sight. Two weeks from now I expect to have my new PC with XP Professional installed. I will also be able to use Virtual PC in order to install and develop against each new Visual Studio .NET 2005 release in an isolated way. With the domain hosting sorted out by then I will be back on the development fast track.

Still, in the meantime I am beavering away as best I can on the basics of the Navigator control and also a SplitContainer for the free Toolkit package.

Please bear with me as I get these issues sorted out and back to full coding and blogging speed.

I’ve decided that my 3.5year old PC no long cuts it when it comes to professional software development. It’s like trying to use a mule when you need a thorough breed race horse. So I’ve ordered a new machine that will in itself motivate me for weeks to come. Two 19′ flat panel screens, a 512MB graphics card (so I will be Vista ready and a couple of large RAID 0 hard drives. Nice!

Webhosting Disruption

As part of the plan for the website I have decided to switch from a Windows hosted site to a Unix box. It might sound like treachery when I am Windows developer but to be honest, it just makes sense.

The designer I am now working with on the site wants to use PHP scripts and a MySQL backend in order to have the blog integrated into the website. On Unix this is a doddle. Trying to do this on a Windows machine is a major headache. No, I believe in using the best tool for the job and in this case it is quicker and therefore cheaper to use Unix. Plus I can easily pick up knowledge of PHP in order to modify and maintain the site myself in the future.

As part of the this process of changing over hosting packages the people at Network Solutions screwed things up. So it will be a few days or even a week before my domain names are working again. So images on this blog will be unavailable for a while.

Oh well, back to the 1.5GHz AMD processor for a few more days…

Just when I thought the concept work for the website was done and dusted another contender throws their hat in the ring. Normally I would not want the extra distraction in looking at another design but as the initial concept looks so good I have to follow it through.

Have a look for yourself by using this link…

Another Concept

It needs a little work but has real potential. I will keep you posted.

I’ve taken the template as provided by the winning web design and used it to generate the five main pages of the website. These have been uploaded to the server so now I actually have a website. Try it out…

Live Website!

Half an Eagle has landed

Actually you will have quickly noticed there is no content on the site. But Rome was not built in a day and my website certainly will not be either. The next step over the coming week or so is to actually fill in some of the pages with details.

Just when I thought I was only going to get a single designer submit an idea another has entered the contest with a design. This is quite different but also a good effort and certainly worth considering with some changes.

You can see the design using this list.

Second Contender

I instructed the designer to remove the extra design elements like the stop button on the top of the page. It does look a little like a WinAmp design at the moment but by removing those it does have potential.

Feedback from readers indicating that the first design had a couple of arty farty style elements that could be removed to improve the look. I requested this from the designer along with a need to improve the header area. Here are the two designs that resulted.

Variation 1
Variation 2

Although an improvement I think both designs are not quite right and so I asked for the header to be worked on again in order to make the logo feel more integrated with the header area.

The Finale

The end result of the cycle is the following final design that I want to run with.

Variation 2

I think this creates a professional feel with a little design flair mixed in. Remember that our controls are going to be at the premium end of the market and so a good professional site is essential. But not just a standard plain site because the components biggest selling point is how great they make your applications look. So we need to show some flair and creativity in the website itself.

Next Step

At this point the design is just a high resolution picture. The next step is to turn the picture into an actual HTML template that can be used to generate pages as needed.

If you’re a web programmer and feel up to the task then let me know, I am willing to pay a sensible amount for a professional to do that work.

After almost a week we only have one design concept submitted so far on the Design Outpost website. But I did have a few others say they were interested in putting together an idea so I hope there will be others to look at soon.

Here is a reduced size version of the design…

Ok, so you cannot see much from there. Use the following link to see the full sized image.

Click Here!

Feedback

Personally I really like the design and with a couple of tweaks think it would be perfectly fine as the actual site template. But do you have other ideas? Does it look too arty and not commercial enough?

I think the time is right to get an initial website up and working. Although I do not have anything in the way of interesting content as yet, once I have a beta version of the free controls ready then I need the website ready to go.

Initially I can place a few screenshots of the work in progress and provide subscription to a notification email list. I intend to give away the basic toolkit of controls for free and so the email list can be used to notify people each time a new release is available.

At the moment I am only building the free controls so all the stuff you are seeing get created will be available for free at some point in the future. Once it reaches a point where there is enough to make a small library, I will package it up and add some documentation.

Design Outpost

When I had the company logo created I used the Guru.com website. This worked out well and I had some feedback from readers that another good design site is Design Outpost. So this time around I will give them a chance and see how it works out.

I posted the project on the templates forum last night so you can see and follow the design contest directly if you like. Alternatively you can wait and read the results on this blog as events transpire.

Looking at the design process on the site it does seem quite a slow process so it might be a week before we have any initial designs to start evaluating. Another potential weakness of the site is that you might only get a single designer offer an initial sketch. Really I would prefer to have a handful of different ideas and then I can pull the best bits from them all in order to create something appropriate.

Only time will tell.

Thanks for the great feedback comments.

Do we need a strapline?

kris makes a good point by asking if a strapline is actually necessary? I assumed that just because most other companies have one that I should as well. Obviously that is not a good reason, but having thought about this more carefully I have come to the conclusion that actually it is a good idea. It’s a good way to get across a simple fundamental message about the company.

When visiting a website I tend to notice the logo and associated strapline first of all. Then my eyes scan downwards to the actual content of the page, skinning over the headlines to see what the content is all about.

So in the worst case people just ignore the strapline, in which case it has caused no harm by being present. In the best case it gets across a simple message I want to convey. This is a no lose situation.

What is the message?

So I guess I need to ask myself what is the message I want to get across to the website visitor. Well I am very clear on what I would like to say. We produce a premium set of visual components that will save your business time and money.

But we need to be careful about putting ideas like saving money or time in the strapline. Just about every company is going to claim they save time and money with their product and so the message is too generic. It needs to be specific.

Looking at the suggestions and working from the ones I like, my new list of candidates comes out like this…

Component Factory
Making you look good.

Component Factory
We build components. You build solutions.

Component Factory
Passionate about your looks.

Component Factory
Creating components so you don’t have to.

Component Factory
Tools that extend your potential.

My current favorite is the second one, because it indicates our position in the value chain. We create the components, the building blocks that the customers use to create a full solution.

If you have any more ideas or better variations then let me know!

Something short that embodies the whole concept of the company can make it quick and easy for new comers to the website to understand what it is they do. Here are a few examples from software companies that operate in the same market as our microISV.

Infragistics
Powering The Presentation Layer

Pure Components
Components…Pure And Simple

ComponentOne
More Tools. Endless Possibilities

Developer Express
Improving the Developer Experience

So, I need my own strapline for Component Factory. As a company we are going to produce user interface controls in order to make the customers applications look professional. They are intended to be a premium level product that speeds up project schedules by being quick and easy to use but also provide a high level of flexibility.

So far I have only come up with one candidate. Here we go…

Component Factory
Making You Look Good

Not sure if it sounds a bit cheesy. But it indicates straight away that we aiming to make your application look good and could also be taken to mean that the developer will look good for creating such a great appearance very quickly.

Think you can do better? I hope so, lets hear your ideas!

The second day of the marketing course covered several areas including: the creation of a good press release; how to get free PR; establishing joint ventures; and Internet marketing.

All of the material was of a high standard and well thought out and I really enjoyed the whole course. Much of the useful information was given with case studies from the presenter’s actual clients along with little stories and small details that really showed in depth how an interesting idea can be worked out in a real life business.

As with most areas of business, and indeed life in general, most of the good advice is actually just well thought out common sense. This is not a get-rich-quick style scheme and you left the course with a marketing plan for your business covering actions to take over the next few months.

I doubt that anything presented was actually completely new to the world of marketing but when you’re starting out from ground zero, as I am, it was a great way to learn how to create a proper marketing plan and a systematic approach. No more random ideas that you try out, instead you’re deliberately dedicating time to a proper plan.

Here is a link to his website Chris Cardell and I suggest you sign up to his newsletter that will give you some free tips for the first few weeks. Of course, he uses all this own tips and advice in marketing his own website!

Too Good to be True

If an advertising outlet, such as a trade magazine, contacted you and offered the oppourtunity to reach a group of people interested in your product, would you be interested? They also provide a guarantee so you only pay if the people actually express an interest in your offering. Of course you would think this is great. In reality it never happens, you try getting MSDN magazine to guarantee a response to your advert!

But just imagine if you could get that kind of deal. No more spending a lump sum on a magazine advert with no idea if it really does get to the people you are interested in. No idea if they actually show an interest by visiting your website. That is the difference between pay-per-click advertising and traditional trade magazine adverts.

Pay-per-Click

So the first strategy for Internet marketing is to ensure that you direct your target audience to your website using pay-per-click on Google. Of course, using the advice from the previous marketing post you would start very small and carefully. You would start by using a small daily budget and keep split testing your advert.

Split Testing

You should always have two versions of your advert on Google that differ by only one small detail. For example, your first advert is in traditional English format and your second is identical except you use capital letters at the start of each word. Even such a small detail can make a big difference to the click through rate.

After a few days you compare the click through rates of both adverts and then throw away the worst performer. Then you create another new advert and vary it from your best advert so far by just one factor. By constantly varying just one small detail you are constantly trying to improve the click through rate.

This is important because how high up your advert appears is dependant not just on how much your willing to spend on the advert but also the number of click throughs. About 50% of the ranking is determined by the click through rate and so pushing this up higher will save money and improve the number of visitors to your site.

Email Marketing

You should make a strong effort to get the email address of every visitor to your website. Not because you want to spam them, because we all know how annoying that is, but because it is much harder to get a completely new customer than communicate and sell to an existing one.

If you offer a demo version of your product get the visitors email and send them a link to download it, rather than just giving the link straight away. Then you can follow up in the future. After a few days you can ask the potential customer for their feedback.

At the very least this is useful in finding out what features are missing or putting off the visitors from buying. That is great information for helping you to improve your product. Asking existing customers what they think of the product is less useful because it obviously already meets their needs, otherwise they would not have bought it! But getting feedback from those that almost bought the product is of fantastic value and almost impossible to get from any other means.

Of course you can also use the emails to send them special offers in the future so they do not miss out on new products you release or temporary price reductions. I would also suggest that you ensure it is easy for them to unsubscribe and never give their email to any other organisation. You’re trying to establish a good quality relationship with them.

If you do not have a demo or trial download then think about creating some useful information to give away for free. Give them a report or set of articles that has value to them and would entice them to supply an email address for them to be delivered. The key point is you have to give them something of real value in return for them being willing to let you communicate with them. The more value you can supply then the more likely they are to take you seriously and be interested in reading your other emails.

Auto-responders

Before the course I had already heard of software to handle lists of subscribers. Just the sort of software needed to automate the process as described above. But I did not realise how easy it was to setup an auto responder for email marketing.

For example, your website visitor is interested in your product and would like to download the demo to test it out. So they enter their email address and press the Submit button. Their email address is automatically added to an email list and they immediately get a auto response email with instructions on how to download the demo.

The clever part is that the auto responder is set up to automatically send a follow up email to them after a certain number of days. So you configure the list to send a second email two days latter asking them to fill in a simple online feedback form to let you know what they think of the trial product.

Then after another two days you could send them a free article that describes more advanced features that they would then be able to make use of, now they are more familiar with the software. Finally you might then send a last email 10 days after the original download and offer them a 10% discount if they buy in the next week.

This sequence of emails and the delay between them is set up by you and then just works without any intervention. If you have 1000 requests for the download each month can you imagine the work involved in doing that manually? Crazy. But with an auto responder costing maybe $100 to buy it all happens completely automatically.

Automation, The microISV Friend

The technology behind an auto responder is of course trivial but it is the fact you can automate the process that is so useful to us microISV businesses. Working on your own or maybe just in your spare time you have to automate absolutely everything that you can. Time is the one thing we do not have much off. (As well as money or enough customers!)

It does not get much better than the following in terms of marketing…

Let pay-per-click gather new visitors
Let your website gain their interest
Let the download page gather the email address
Let the auto responder communicate with the visitor
Let a third party handle the ecommerce sale

You sit at your computer and write the code and the automated system handles the majority of the heavy lifting. Of course you need to spend some time each week keeping an eye on the system and tweaking it to gain the best results.

Too Good to be True

Just think, one night you will be fast asleep and someone on the opposite side of the world will travel through the entire automated system and buy your software. Now imagine you had told someone 10 or 15 years ago about this scenario. Add into the mix that you have almost no budget to spend and you only had to sit in your study, what would they say? They would say it was too good to be true.

Now tell me the Internet is not amazing!

To be a successful microISV we need to achieve two things. First of all we need to be good at innovation. If we cannot come up with a great idea and write the code to make it happen then we do not have a product to sell.

Creating an average product in a crowded marketplace is not a great recipe for sales. So we need to innovate in some way. It doesn’t have to be the next killer application like VisiCalc but it has to be a compelling solution to a problem that people have.

I think this half of the microISV equation comes quite easily to most developers. We love to write code and we always think we can do it better than anyone else. Plus we are always full of ideas of some cool product we would love to create. So usually the innovation side is where we get started.

The second half of success is marketing. That forgotten half that most of us don’t even think about until the product is already fully written. This includes me, the first product I wrote had no marketing strategy for at least the first 18 months of being sold!

Learn, Learn, Learn

I was thinking about this issue a few weeks ago and wondering how to handle marketing for the components I will be creating over the coming months. Then it struck me that I should solve the problem in the same way I would a technical problem.

If I need a new skill, such as learning a computer language, then I go on a training course. Why should learning a new skill like marketing being any different? So that is exactly what I have organized. Today I went on the first day of a two day marketing course that has a particular focus on Internet marketing.

Rather than hog this information to myself I will post about the interesting points covered relevant to our situation. There is far too much detail to write up everything from the first day in one go, but we can start with the overview of the successful marketing process. (His claim, not mine!)

The Five Golden Rules

1. Purpose of your business
2. The three ways to grow your business
3. Create multiple pillars of marketing
4. Test and measure
5. Calculate your customers true value

Lets have a look in more details at each area in turn.

1. Purpose of your business

You probably think that the purpose of any business is to make money for the shareholders and especially so if your one of the shareholders yourself! But there is actually only one purpose that all really successful businesses have. Namely the desire to add value to the lives of their customers.

In fact not just a desire to add value but an absolute passion for it. You need to have the mindset of wanting to create incredible value for your customers and then the profits will take care of themselves.

2. The three ways to grow your business

There are only three ways to grow your business. You can increase the number of customers. You could increase the average spend from each customer and last of all you can increase the frequency that each customer buys from you.

In fact you should be trying to increase all three at the same time. If you can increase your number of customers by 10%, and the average spend of customers by 10% and finally the buying frequency by 10% then your overall revenue goes up by an impressive 33%. Each individual 10% increase does not seem impossible to achieve but it is the cumulative effect that can make a really big difference.

3. Create multiple pillars of marketing

Most businesses rely on just one or maybe two different pillars of marketing. They use just advertising or maybe just direct mail to achieve sales. Instead you should ensure that you deliberately create and use multiple marketing pillars.

So investigate advertising, direct mail, telephone sales, referrals, pay per click, email, PR and joint ventures. Have a deliberate policy of trying out new marketing methods on a regular basis to reach more potential customers.

4. Test and measure

The vast majority of advertising and indeed marketing is a waste of money. In order to avoid wasting money you have to ensure that you can test and measure every aspect of your marketing.

If you place an advert on a website, then ensure you can measure the number of visitors this brings to your site. Even more important, make sure you can measure the number of sales this generates. Everything from each advert to each email campaign must be measurable.

Only then can you decide if the cost justified the resultant sales, and it also allows comparisons. You try one advert with a particular headline and you make 5 sales from it. Next month you do exactly the same but with a different headline and see what sales that generates. This way you can refine and improve the effectiveness of your marketing and constantly try out new ideas to find what does and does not work.

5. Calculate your customers true value

This calculation is integral to helping with step 4. You need to work out how much each new customer is worth in revenue to your business. So for example, an average customer buys three products from you over a period of three years and that equates to $600 in revenue.

Using this figure you can calculate if a marketing approach is worthwhile. If an advert on a website generates 3 new customers then you know that the value to you (on average) is $600 per customer or $1800 overall. But if the cost of the advert itself was only $1000 then you know it is worth doing again and again.

This total value of a customer is important and not just the initial revenue they create. Your new customer might only make a single purchase in the first month and so only be worth an initial $200 to you. Multiply that by 3 new customers and it looks like your $1000 advert is only returning $600 in revenue. But from analysis of your customer buying patterns you know that over the full three years that the average customers stays with you it will actually pay off.

Without knowing the true value of your average customer you cannot make intelligent decisions about what will and will not pay for itself in terms of your marketing spend.

Summary

This is really just a simple overview and does not provide the interesting stories and case studies that were the real heart of the presentation today. For me the really interesting points were 2, 4 and 5.

Make sure you can measure, or at least roughly estimate, the value of each new customer. From that you can carefully test new marketing ideas and measure the effectiveness. Try each new idea on small scale and only when you know it is working do you then scale it up to achieve the big effect.

As already mentioned in a post right back at the start of the blog, I already have a pretty clear idea of what the first three product components will be. Our first component is actually quite simple in concept and so don’t expect it to blow your socks off!

Although simple it is an essential building block needed for the second and third components that will be built on top of it. So it provides the foundation for the rest of the component suite. Not just as a reusable component but also by providing helper classes and base implementations that can be reused later on.

Classic Controls

After working with several different user interface libraries you being to notice that there are several custom controls that obviously are conceptually related. Yet, to my surprise, they have never been built from the same base class or using the same fundamental building blocks. This makes it difficult to interoperate between them.

Think about the classic TabControl. This allows the user to navigate around a set of pages in a random manner. They can click from page to page by using the appropriate tab header. Now think about the classic Wizard dialog. Again the the user can navigate around a set of pages, but this time in a linear fashion. Another more recent control is the Outlook bar from Microsoft Outlook 2003. Here you can select pages at random by using the large square buttons at the bottom of the control.

Really these are all just controls that allow the user to define a set of display pages and then provide different user interfaces for moving between them. So our first component is going to be called the Navigator and do just that, give a variety of user interface mechanisms to move around pages.

The Navigator

Having a component capable of providing many navigation interfaces has several key advantages. With other libraries you might create a TabControl with a set of TabPage instances. But if user feedback indicates you need to change over to a Wizard you cannot just copy across the TabPage instances. The chances are your Wizard component has a completely different set of classes and you need to go to some effort to copy across your designs.

Although not a huge effort it does still take time to learn about the new component and copy across the controls for each page. With our navigator they just change the mode property and hay presto, it changes over. Better yet they can use the traditional TabControl style appearance when designing, making it easy to randomly move around, and then switch it to Wizard operation when finished.

So our first unique selling point for the component is the provision of multiple modes or user interaction. We provide all your page navigation needs in one handy control that is a piece of cake to learn. You learn how one control works instead of having to understand several.

Separating the Layers

Our second unique selling point is going to come from the architecture of the control. Instead of encapsulating all the drawing inside the control we are going to separate out the functionality into different layers.

Palette Layer – Provides the colors and font for drawing.
Rendering Layer – Draws using a palette in a particular style.
View Layer – Handles the layout of visual elements.
Controller Layer – Responds to events and initiates actions.
Model Layer – Manages the collection of pages.

This is really just an extension of the traditional Model-View-Controller design pattern where the View is split into three separate layers. This makes it easy for us to change over the palette layer to give a different appearance without having to alter the renderer at all.

Before I get stuck into too much of the actual coding, any feedback on the idea would be appreciated. But remember that although the Navigator will be sold as a stand alone product in its own right, it is mainly intended as the building block for other more value added components later on. So don’t be too harsh!

First of all thanks for leaving comments on the last post about the final set of logos. At the last count the score was 5 for the first cartoon logo and 6 for the second corporate version. I was already leaning towards the second logo anyway but the feedback really confirms my initial preference. So I’m going to use the second logo.

Technology Decision

My first major technical decision is the choice of technology for developing my C# visual components. We need to look into the future and ensure that anything written is not going to be out of date before it is even released. The current released development versions are .NET 1.1 for the Framework and VS.NET 2003 for the IDE.

Visual Studio .NET 2005 and .NET 2.0

Looking ahead the next big change is the release of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 on the 7th November 2005. I already have the Beta 2 release of this and have been playing around with it recently. Although a little shaky it is just about stable enough to develop against.

Avalon and Longhorn

Further out is the new Avalon user interface framework that was originally slated to be released with Longhorn. For those not familiar with Avalon its a fundamentally new framework for developing user interfaces in the managed code environment.

Whereas Windows.Forms is based on GDI+ the Avalon framework uses DirectX. There are early releases of Avalon being made in order for developers to play around with it. However these are very much development releases and each update contains fundamental changes to part of the design.

A full stable release of this technology cannot be expected until the release of Longhorn, which is scheduled for the end of 2006.

Comparing the two options

If we develop for .NET 2.0 then we can start development straight away and know that few, if any, changes will be needed when the full release is made. Another advantage is that we only have to wait 5 months until its released and so we can sell components from then onwards. On the negative side the product will have a lifespan limited by the time it takes for Avalon to really take off.

If instead we go for Avalon then we don’t have a proper development environment and have to learn this new technology from scratch. That also means we have to wait some time before a commercial market emerges for these components. On the plus side it would mean we can get involved right from the onset of the new technology, and stay at the leading edge of the system as well as enjoying a longer lifetime for any software developed.

The final decision

As a code monkey I am tempted by the idea of getting into Avalon, if only for the excitement of getting into something new and interesting. But from a business point of view I believe the correct decision is to go with .NET 2.0, at least for the time being.

A would rather go with the more certain opportunity even if it has a shorter potential lifetime, than try and go for something way off in the future that is currently vapourware. Plus the release of .NET 2.0 is about the right time frame for writing a first release of a product and having the website and e-commerce ready.

So, time to create a new VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 solution and get cracking!

As our target customers are actually other software developers we have the advantage of doing all our selling via the internet. If a programmer wants to buy a software component they are almost bound to start by using either a google search or by visiting an online component store such as Component Source.

We want to have a domain name that instantly tells the potential customer what it is we do, so they know they are coming to the right place. So the name needs to be specific enough to tell them what we do but not so specific that creating other products invalidates it. Getting the balance right is important but tricky.

There are two obvious approaches to creating a name. Either create a completely new word that is not in the dictionary or create a name from correct English words. A good example of the first approach would be Microsoft and the second would be Rational Software.

After spending an hour working on the first approach I gave up. Coming up with a new word is really hard and no matter what I tried it sounded really stupid. The best I managed was Visiwig and so you can see how bad things were! So I kicked this idea into the long grass and opted to try the second approach.

I began by creating a list of words appropriate for the company. As we intend to sell visual components to developers I can up with the following set of words:-

Art, Visual, Widget, Doodads
Component, Software, Dynamic

From this I derived lots of potential names that were then thinned down to the following set that appealed to me. You will of course instantly notice that the first one has no relation to the what the company does and is not related to the list of original words either.

Crazy Software
Visual Widgets
Visual Dynamics
Software Dynamics

This is an interesting phenomenon that might be just me or maybe it occurs to everyone. But as I was thinking of names a new idea would suddenly pop into my head from nowhere. If I liked the idea I would write it down.

Next I showed the list to the wife to see how they sounded to someone else. Lucky for me she was sat down when I read out Crazy Software because she doubled up with laughter for about 5 minutes and almost wet herself. So I scratched that one off the list.

Next up was Visual Widgets, which only evoked a quizzical look because being a girl and from Australia she had no idea what a Widget is. The last two were given the seal of approval with Software Dynamics being the clear favorite. It was also my favorite and so the decision was made.

You can probably guess what is coming next. I tride to registier the domain name and sure enough www.softwaredynamics.com was already registered. Well I should not be surprised, if it sounds good to me then it probably sounds good to someone else. But there was a glimmer of hope. Instead of being registered to a trading company it was held by one of those domain name sharks that is holding it with the sole purpose of selling it on at a profit to some poor mug like me.

Well I sent them an email and after about a day they responded saying it would cost a mere $6000 to buy. But I had better be quick because domain name prices are rising all the time! As a microISV that is more than I want to spend in the first year of starting the company and so that idea is out the window. Not to mention that I object to lining the pockets of the these domain name sharks anyway.

But one good thing came out of the process and that is finding a good use for the search page on the sharks website. Now instead of generating potential domain names myself I entered my list of keywords into their page and let it come up with lots of ideas for me. You can try it yourself by entering a list of words into the Keyword(s) field and then pressing the Search button on this Search Page.

Obviously all the ideas they come up with are for domains that they happen to want to sell, but it does create lots of variations which lead you to new ideas. It certainly beats using a pen and paper. After doing this for a couple of minutes I came up with the Component Factory name. This appealed to me because it encapsulates exactly what the company produces, components. Plus the use of the word factory would make it easy to create a distinctive logo and identity for the company.

It also conforms to the criteria I started with. Specific enough to describe what the company does but not too specific that it would become obsolete quickly. Most important of all it has the feel good factor. It feels good and appeals to me which is important because the whole point of being your own boss is to do things your own way and enjoy the process.

Now all I had to do was register the name and its various extensions in the way described in my last article. On investigation it turns out that the name is already registered by a shark, albeit a different shark this time. This time the shark only wanted $600 for the name. I did think about ditching the name and starting all over again just as a matter of principle. But in the end I decided I could afford that amount and I really wanted to get hold of that name.

So I bought the ComponentFactory.com domain name for $600 and then purchased some other variations such as .co.uk, .us, .org, .biz, .name and .info and ensured they were all fully paid up for 5 years into the future. I used Network Solutions to register the names, perform the transfer from the shark and host a website.

At the end of the long winded process I can recommend that you leave yourself plenty of time to come up with a name and be prepared to find that your first few ideas have already been registered. But make sure you do not give in and keep going until you get something you are 100% happy with because your going to be using it, hopefully, for many years to come!

Coming up with a good name is actually much harder than you think. It took me several weeks to get from starting to think about possible names to actually having bought the domain names. Right at the start I was determined to avoid two mistakes I have made in the past when doing the same thing.

My first mistake was to create a domain name that was exactly the same as the name of the product. On first inspection this does not seem such a bad idea. Users that can remember the name of your product can find the website without having to remember the name of the company that produces it. I certainly sometimes struggle to recall the name of the company associated with a particular product and vica versa.

If you are definitely only ever going to be a one product company then I suppose it is an appropriate strategy. This is the way that Winzip has developed itself. Their website is www.winzip.com and we have all heard of the product.

But what happens when you create your second product? You need to have another domain name for that new product and then you have to start from scratch in building up awareness of the new name. Now if you created Winzip then it’s not a problem, your laying on the beach in Hawaii sipping a gin and tonic without caring about product number two.

For the rest of us there is a good chance there will be a second product and we might as well leverage all the effort in getting the company name into the customers mind. When they come back to our website to check for a later version of product number one we have a chance to tell them how cool our second product is. When product one is discontinued because of changes in technology we still have that brand name of the company in their head.

My second mistake was to let a domain name I had registered lapse. This was not deliberate but a simple oversight because I was not keeping track of when it was due to expire. Once I realised my first years registration had lapsed, and it was only about one day afterwards, I tried to register it again. You can guess what happened. Someone else had registered the name straight away and now suddenly I had lost the domain name!

I was lucky in that the domain name was the domain name of the company and not the product and at that point the vast majority of people were using the product domain name. So although I did not lose any real business it did mean that from then on I was stuck using the product domain name as the website access to not just the product but the whole company.

From these mistakes I have come up with the following domain name rules that I intend to follow this time around:-

1. Think of a domain name for the brand
2. Register popular variants (.com, .net, .org etc)
3. Register all domain names for 5 years
4. If possible enable auto renew for after the 5 years

If your hosting company allows you to auto renew then you could just initially pay for a single year and let the automatic renew handle it from then one. That would reduce the initial costs for your own microISV.

But after the pain of losing a domain name in the past I am determined it will never happen again and instead will definitely stump up for an initial 5 years cost in one go. Actually, if your only registering a single domain name this cost is not that prohibitive anyway, it is really only when doing this for several different domain name extensions it starts to add up.

That is the best career advice I ever heard and I think it applies equally to a business. But it also has to be combined with the work ethic to really get the maximum benefit. This is the guiding principle used to decide on the type of software and the market to target with my microISV.

My development background is based on 8 years of C++ on Windows and then using C# and .NET since it was first released as a Beta version. During all this time I have spent more time working on user interface controls than anything else.

This has been a deliberate focus because I find working on visual components easier then working with databases, middleware or other areas. Being easier meant it was enjoyable and fun rather than feeling like a chore. I also find it easy to work hard in this area precisely because I enjoy it, which is not something I have ever been able to say about database schemas!

So after many years of spending long hours working on various custom controls and user interfaces I think I understand this area well. More importantly I believe that I can produce software as good as anything else on the market.

Therefore it is an obvious decision on what type of software to produce and the market to target. My microISV is going to produce user interface components for the Microsoft Windows platform based on C# and .NET technology.

The big advantage of being a one man outfit is speed. You can change direction in an instant and react to events on the moment. I’m not trying to convince a bank manager or outside investor to stump up some cash so I am not bothering with the business plan. Far more important is to have the vision thing.

Every successful software project I have worked on always has one person that has the big vision and it is always a techie. They have a vision inside their head of how the product is going to work. Not just in the look and feel but also the design and structure of the resulting code. Every developer gains confidence from this and you end up working as team and all moving in the same direction. The net result is a good chance of success.

As it happens I already have the vision of where I want the company to be and the kind of products it will be producing. Just as important I can visualise the first two product ideas very clearly, both in terms of how they will look and also the overall design.

Now we need to turn the vision into some concrete goals. After all, the reason most people never achieve their goals in life is simple. They never actually set any. So lets define the overall goals for the company itself…

Goal 1: Achieve first sale
Goal 2: Annualised sales equal to day job salary
Goal 3: Annualised sales twice day job salary
Goal 4: Net revenue twice day job, quit day job!

The whole point of the microISV is to earn enough to quit the day job and work full time for myself. I have no idea how long it will take to achieve this and so see no point in putting target dates against the goals.

From now on I am focused just on the first goal, working towards the first sale.

For the first few years of being a programmer I never even thought about the possibility of being my own boss, of actually owning and running my own company. That was the sort of thing a few lucky others might do but never me. I only thought of myself as a code monkey, grinding away at the keyboard and enjoying the technical challenges involved.

But then things started to change. After being made redundant from my permmie job I became a contractor and enjoyed the easy money that went with the dot com boom years. Although being a contractor meant having a company it was really only a half way house to being a real business. But I started to dream the impossible, to dream of a day when I would actually start and run a real software business.

Then for a couple of years I had a little accidental success. Whilst investigating the new Microsoft .NET technology, then just being released, I created a small software library as a learning exercise. I managed to turn this little spare time project into something that could be sold to other developers. This has made a little bit of money and I learned some useful lessons from the process but this came about more by accident than by planning. But it wetted my appetite.

Since then I have read with interest the articles by Erik Sink about the concept of the microISV. The idea of a one-man company that produces software products in order to create a viable stand alone company. Of actually giving up the day job and working for yourself, not as a contractor or self employed, but as a fully-fledged product based business.

This microISV concept has really fired my enthusiasm and I have read every blog and article I can find on the idea. Combine this concept with a few ideas I have for products and suddenly I am not just dreaming about the impossible but planning on living the dream.

So that’s the purpose of this blog, to track the process of starting a microISV from ground zero and seeing where it goes. It might be very embarrassing if it turns into a complete turkey, but I think the extra motivation of trying to avoid public humiliation will help me during the long dark hours ahead.

And this is where you come into the picture. I am hoping that you will be able to provide useful feedback and ideas to help me out along the way. As I share some of the problems and issues I encounter I would love to hear others ideas and suggestions. So join me for the ride and lets see where it goes!