MicroISV

Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality is a new book by Bob Walsh about small software companies.  It is intended for people who want to start their own company.  It is a guide to starting the company and all the things you need to do to get started.  It details all the things you need to do to do, from the legalities of what type of corporation to form to advice on marketing and technical support.

Let me start out this review simply: if you are looking to start your own small software company (or have just started doing so), buy this book.  There is nothing else available like it that covers so much territory about the basics of starting and running a small software company.  Just buy it and read it.

Now, for the rest of the review, remember that I'm not really the target market for this book - I'm not starting out, I've already done it.

The term "micro-ISV" was invented by Eric Sink in article in 2004 for MSDN.  I'm not a great fan of the term, primarily because of the ISV part.  An ISV sounds like something that should have a four wheel drive.  It is a term coined by Microsoft and stands for "independent software vendor".   A micro-ISV is Eric's term for a very small software vendor.  In fact, he pretty much meant the term to stand for a company of one software developer.

In the year plus since Eric's article was written, the term has really caught on.  There was a need for a term to describe small software companies, since there are so many of them.  Shareware is not really the right term anymore, and in any case many small software companies are not using the shareware marketing method, so a more general term was needed.  A microisv.com web site was created and it has become the basic topic of a web discussion forum.

As the term was used more and more, it seems to have stretched to refer to any small software company, including Eric's company SourceGear and Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software, both of which have a couple of dozen employees or more. 

In the book, Bob Walsh lists these companies as very successful Micro-ISVs near the end of the book.  To me, the best part of the book was near the end where he has short interviews with the founders of 25 MicroISVs. 

He says "please excuse the length of this chapter", but in fact the main problem with the book is that this chapter is too short.  The interviews are only 2 or 3 pages with each company and I would have liked to have seen much longer interviews with even more companies.

I wish that there had been more in the interviews about each companies business processes - how they handle the various workloads.  That is, how does a one, two, or handful of people do all the things that a company needs to do.  And I would be interested in more about the long term goals of a microISV, questions about whether the company wants to grow and become a full ISV, get bought out, or whether the goal is to remain a small company.

The book touches on these issues in many places, but since the book has to cover so many basic topics it never goes into these more advanced topics in much detail.

In short, after reading the book I guess I want to read the sequel.  This book is the manual for how to start up a MicroISV, now I want to read the book about how you run a MicroISV over the long term.

The author, Bob Walsh, has a blog at ToDoOrElse.com.  He has also started up a new blog specifically for the book at MyMicroISV.com.  Some interviews are available on that site (similar to the interviews in the book).   There is an interview with Bob Walsh at microisv.com.

The forward of the book by Joel Spolsky is available online at JoelonSoftware.com.  In it, he says

Don’t start a business if you can’t explain what pain it solves, for whom, and why your product will eliminate this pain, and how the customer will pay to solve this pain.

This only applies to business software, of course.  For entertainment software, you need to explain what pleasure it gives - that is, it better be fun.

Comments

[Factory]

"For entertainment software, you need to explain what pleasure it gives - that is, it better be fun."
Hmm, I'm not so sure. A game still should define a target audience, and say why that audience will like the game.
One thing I would critique is that the saying by Joel would really orient you towards exploiting unexplored niches, which is not always the best way of doing business.

[Bob Walsh]

Thanks Thomas for the great (and positive) review.

A sequel - oh my bleeding fingers! Seriously, for now, the site http://mymicroisv.com is the sequel (I've started on book 2, working title Clear Blogging, but that's another story.)

Thanks again,

[Game]

Excellent info, gotta order this book.