Day 11 – Starting a new business
There’s a billion things to do and just figuring out where to start is a monumental task unto itself. Actually, this is actually Day 11 and the idea for fully documenting this process only came to me yesterday.
To give you a bit of background, I read a lot of things on the Internet (all of them are true of course), and the vast majority of the web logs I read are written by successful business people. Most are programmers, and the reason I tend to read blogs written by programmers is that we tend to have similar insight into a lot of things. I know and trust their perspective generally as if it were my own. Mind you, I’m not blindly reading and memorizing everything I see and quoting it as gospel, but I do lend a certain amount of credibility to those written by people that I may not know personally, but certainly respect.
While some have been around for only a short time, others have been around for a number of years. I gave some thought to this after coming up with the idea to document the progress of Moon River Software and realized that a central theme occurs with all of the ones I read on a regular basis.
Not one of them is written by a company that’s in the very early stages of business.
Read that again, because I think it is truly important. This isn’t to say blogs written by companies that are just starting out don’t exist of course, but I simply haven’t found them nor have I taken an excessive amount of time to search for them. Having noticed that my own tendencies tend to be echoed by others (or vice versa), I decided to create my own blog for the umpteenth time.
On August 10th, 2005 I filed with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the incorporation of Moon River Software, Inc. In addition to Moon River Software, as a grand social experiment, I will be documenting the progress of the company, what it took to get started, and its’ progress as time goes on, be it good or bad. You see, I believe that while everyone enjoys reading a success story, we often learn far more from our failures than our successes. Think about that. You don’t always know what it was that you did correctly if you succeed on the first try.
It could have been blind luck, the stars just happened to be aligned correctly, you were in the right place at the right time, etc. The point is that perhaps as much as you’d like to think otherwise, you may not have known exactly what you were doing. Any number of successful people will no doubt tell you that they didn’t quite know what they were doing when they started out, but they most certainly figured it out.
My goal is to give the unmitigated truth about what it takes to get a startup software company off the ground. I’ll be honest and say that like 99% of the rest of the entrepreneurs on the planet, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. The other 1% are lying to themselves. So keep checking back, and perhaps you’ll be as intrigued as I am about what’s going to happen. Paramount to this social experiment is getting the business off the ground and making it profitable. While I may not write about each and every thing as it happens, I will certainly do my best to write about it afterwards when I’ve had some time to reflect upon it and give due diligence to what it means.
