A Precarious Balance

Over the years, I've always done my own taxes and managed my own books. It's tedious, but why pay somebody else to do it? When I incorporated back in 2005, I decided that I would find an accountant. Choosing to be an optimist about my business' future, it seemed wise to find somebody good and establish a relationship with them while I ...

...and don't read books by people who write blogs. Why? Because they can lead you places that are uncomfortable. They're not to blame for starting me down this unfamiliar path, but I can certainly say they sped up my pace. Where have I gone? Where do I find myself? Shortly before the blogs, I did something unpredictable ...

Found via way of the microISV blog, Evan Williams writes Ten Rules for Web Startups. His guidelines resonate with me, especially the one about being narrow and being greedy <g>. --Sean Winstead Tags: ISV, Business

When working at prior jobs, one of the things that always nagged me was the feeling of always being behind. Not behind in ''getting work done'' sense. That's just a fact of life because there's always more to do than you can get done. When I first joined TurboPower, several of the guys were placed on a team to write a product named Internet ...

If you need to build a custom application yet desire to re-use it for other customers or sell it as a ''packaged'' product, there are a couple of guidelines that apply. If you have some guidelines that aren't listed here, or you think mine could use some correcting or beefing up, feel free to do so in the comments. Prepare for ...

About 7 or 8 years ago, while still calling St. Louis home, I worked at a small consulting company. I was in my early thirties and had been given the job as project lead for a large project. We were to write a back office system for an office supplies wholesaler named Distribution Management Incorporated. I was naive and inexperienced. Thought we ...

I love seeing how a business works and I enjoy putting together systems to make it do so. But that can turn into a bad thing. At both TurboPower and ComponentScience, I was involved in writing and maintaining the systems that helped the business function. In the latter stages of TurboPower's life, I took on some responsibility for a home ...

You'd think that if your company sold 20 products, you'd be doing pretty well even if it seems like you don't have enough cowboys to wrangle them. I'm not so sure. On occasion, we talked about TurboPower being a Walmart for software. Maybe not Walmart cheap, but Walmart-ish in the way that you could go to TurboPower and find whatever you need for ...

There are quite a few things about being a software vendor that puzzle me. One is striking a balance between number of employed software engineers vs. number of products sold. I've been in a couple of situations where the ratio of products to programmers seemed to high. The situation that sticks out most in my mind is TurboPower. During my ...

When a product dies, it dies. Sometimes you can extend its life by posting it to a service like SourceForge. But I've seen where that just delays the inevitable. In rare cases, a product can rise from the dead. But it doesn't do so on its own. Near the end of its life, TurboPower had decided to open source the bulk of its products. Geoff ...