Business for programmers. How to start a business (Eric Sink on the Business of Software) (Category Bootstrapping)

Continuing to disassemble his bookshelf from old books, came across this collection of essays from Erica Sinka How programmers start and develop a product business. The original came out in Apress in 2006 Russian edition - in "Peter" in 2011Mm. The material grew from the eponymous column of Sinca on MSDN (2003–2005)I mean, it's already gone. 20 years. Eric Sink, Founder of SourceGear (Vault/Fortress, version control tools)He previously led a browser team at Spyglass that made early versions of what became Internet Explorer. He also initiated the AbiWord project. SourceGear team brings cross-platform integration with TFS (Teamprise)It was sold to Microsoft.

In this book, Sink popularized the concept of the solo founders of small and independent software vendors. At the time of the book’s release, this was not very common, but the book was well received, and the foreword to the book was written by himself. Joel SpolskiJoel on Software, co-founder of Stack Overflow and creator of Trello.

If we talk about the context of writing the book, then in those days there was an era of shareware and boxes, blogs and forums were the main ones in terms of marketing, plus many speculated about the risks of choosing the right OS / framework, conditionally Windows / Linux, Java /.net /etc. Now, of course, everything is different - we have clouds and marketplaces of applications, there are social networks and communities around the software, and most importantly, there are AI-instruments that reduce the cost of development and allow you to approach the concept of solo entrepreneurs.

As for the main ideas of the book, here they are.

1. Micro vendors should make a focus product for a narrow market, often by force. 1–3 man. And it is important not to confuse engineering love of features with market value. Now it is not a problem to write code - it is important to find a product market fit for the product and quickly develop it before competitors find something similar:)
2. Entrepreneurship for the developer: honest self-assessment, creating a plan in case it does not go, choosing a niche with numbers (unit-economy)Not just because of the passion.
3. Finance for Geeks: Simple reports, margins, “why open-source monetization is difficult” (not)take the money. Now how to count the financial product written a lot, but open source monetization is still difficult.
4. People: "need developers, not programmers," caution in hiring, "great hacker е great hiring." Now it is about the fact that with AI assistants, it is not “coders” that win, but those who know how to set tasks, validate value, build a sales / positioning system. The theme of the chapter on people became even more relevant.
5. Marketing is not post-processing: positioning first, then product; choosing competitors consciously. ChatGPT could be the next big distribution channel (I'm already in detail. handler Interview with Brian Balfour) 6 Platform Risk: “Be Careful Where You Build” – Weigh down your platform/ecosystem dependency. Now it's about the right choice of provider, licenses, a sudden change in pricing rules.
6. Transparency and sales: blog, forums, honesty about problems, easy demo access, money-back, clear price. “Build in public”, “changelog culture” and “community-led growth”
7. Tactics of the era: trade shows and magazine advertising – useful as a historical context (It doesn't work now.)

In general, the book was definitely interesting in its time, and now it is also readable, but you need to make corrections in the places that have changed over the past twenty years.

P.S. And as usual, I'll take this book to our bookshare corner at our work on Monday:)

#Management #Leadership #Startup #Engineering #Software #Business