I think I may have mentioned this already, but if not, here it is again. When you’re a sole proprietarship, or arrogant enough to think you can run the entire show, and/or both of those things, you’re frequently the victim of your own faults, quirks, and lack of knowledge on various subject matter. This is because you’ve put yourself in a position of being responsible for managing and delivering every aspect of your product. Having a lack of knowledge on any single piece of subject matter is a real time killer.
Outside of holidays, legal proceedings, and actual incorporation, my current time management problems are related to finishing product purchase and customer management code for the website. Awhile back I made the decision to run everything under the Microsoft platform since most/all of the software I’d be selling and licensing would be for Microsoft/.NET and it just didn’t make sense to throw Linux into the mix as I’d hoped to avoid complexity by not mixing computing platforms. Ironically, the problem with this design decision is that I know Linux — specifically web hosting under Linux — extremely well where I know its Microsoft counterparts exactly barely. I wrote some sample code for webstuff under Windows before Thanksgiving and it seemed to work very smoothly, but everything I’ve attempted since then has been a siege. This is not a knock on the software that Microsoft provides, although on the other hand, it is not without its own quirks that have taken me a lot of time to get used to. This is a knock on me for deciding to go for it and underestimating the fundamental differences between webstuff under Linux and webstuff under Microsoft.
When things go bad for a computer scientist, I’ve often remarked, you spend days and days cursing your program and trying to debug it until you finally realize that you forgot to add 1. Once you add 1, everything works fine! In the context of my issues I wrongly assumed the Microsoft webstuff behaved the same way as Linux webstuff so I wasted 2-3 days looking at the same dozen or so lines of code only to realize that my assumptions were wrong in the first place and a complete rewrite was necessary. Things are finally making forward progress in this department but there is much to do. At least I have a decent enough understanding of the Microsoft webstuff now that I can reuse a lot of the stuff I’ve written and hammer out the rest of my apps. Hopefully this won’t take more than another couple of weeks, but we’ll see.
The other nagging issue with webstuff is Web 2.0 and billing APIs. I won’t unfurl the rant I’ve been keeping rolled up in the attic but programming a product->purchase->billing interface against one of the billing APIs from a major provider of secure credit card/purchase transactions is unnecessarily difficult if you want your web *interface* to look sane as you transition from a shopping cart to a final purchase window. I could’ve done things in the silly way where you have a shopping cart, you redirect to a complete disparate webpage on a billing website, the person fills out their personal information Yet Again, clicks a submit button to charge a credit card, then returns to your website to finalize their billing and licensing steps, but the lack of transparency of doing things this way really got to me. At the end of the day I just want the customer experience to be simple and clear; click this to add to cart, click this to checkout, click this to get your license keys, done.
(Yes I know I could’ve hired someone to do this for me. I’m not hiring people to do things since it will cost thousands of dollars to hammer out the remaining steps for a company that (a) hasn’t made a single cent yet and (b) may not recoup thousands of dollars for awhile if at all. Until I actually incorporate and start selling I have no idea how correct my projections will turn out to be. In the meantime, it’s a matter of time and persistence. I cannot speak for patience.)
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An old friend of mine, an MBA, called recently and wanted to know more about the business as his job has been difficult at best (his work involves real estate and properties and we all know what the state of that market can look like these days). I’d love to work with him since I trust and admire him — and I really need someone to drive the business part of the business, but we’ll have to see how it goes. Between proximity and scheduling and my self-driven desire to incorporate in February 2010, most likely as a single-member LLC, I have strong doubts that anything will pan out. Plus, going back to an old sentiment, it’s really, really hard to ask someone to work for free, if only for a partnership stake alone.
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Partner #1 posted to Facebook recently that he’s “finally” (his own word) come up with a new, Big-Giant Idea for a business. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it’s true that after a certain point in time I didn’t want to incorporate with Partner #1, and pulled the trigger on dissolving the partnership before we ever became legally joined at the hip. On the other hand, as you may recall, Partner #1 kind of stringed me along for 3 months and dragged his feet when it came to writing a business plan, showed lack of enthusiasm and doubt about the viability of the product, claimed that he didn’t have that much time to dedicate to our new company (he would’ve been CEO, no less!), that his involvement as CEO should be put on the back burner until his full-time job got back on track, and finally kind of ho-hum agreed to a Skype-based (but billable) meeting with a business lawyer as our final step before incorporation. While I’m glad that Partner #1 found something that struck his fancy I wish that it didn’t come at my expense to a certain degree, or at he made his intentions more clear in the first place.
I do hope that Partner #1 is successful with his idea. I have absolutely no intentions of becoming a business rival, bitter enemy, or a stone thrower. I just wish that things had played out differently.
