
How to Start a Software Company - acangiano
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/so-you-want-to-start-a-software-company.html
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gruseom
Gala's story has been posted here before. It's inspiring insofar as he
identified a need, built software to fill it, and got rich. But one aspect is
maybe not so repeatable: he funded it with $600K of his own money.

The most interesting part to me is how he found a programmer capable of
building the product. It wasn't luck. He spent money on a few bad programmers,
figured out that they sucked, and changed course. That's intelligent and rare
behavior for someone in his position.

Edit: another thought was nagging me about this and I just realized what it
is: although the articles about this guy present him as a non-technical
founder, that's slightly misleading. He may not know a programming language,
but the stories make it clear he's a technically minded person (e.g. he wrote
the first version of the software himself, in spreadsheets).

~~~
crcoffey
That doesn't put fulfilling the need of such a project beyond the reach of any
qualified coder to try and fill the gap himself.

It doesn't cost much for, a group of friends in college to start working on a
project, or some colleagues meeting to throw ideas around, it costs nothing,
and might be the beginning of such a dream.

It just takes an idea, and the will to take the risk.

~~~
dmix
You'd still need to build relationships with companies or have some experience
with a "normal" company and identify a problem that is common among a bunch of
similar businesses.

I wouldn't put much money on a just out of college programmer's ability to
come up with a great problem that needs to be solved... without some exposure
to the industry in question.

That's where the years part comes in.

Although I am confident a qualified programmed could solve the problem in
question with little effort. Marketing is the hard part.

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vaksel

       It only took us nine years to become an overnight success.
    

that's something a lot of people don't understand

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raghus
At first, I wished Inc's dashboard section would also tell us exactly what
Altametrics made or did. Then I went to altametrics.com's About Us page but
there, I found that the BuzzWords:English ratio approaches 1 (seriously, go
read it).

The best I can do is "We write software that helps restaurants become more
profitable by controlling costs"

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edw519
_After wasting three months and several thousand dollars on inexperienced
programmers, I realized you get what you pay for._

Tell my boss.

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edw519
This is a _very_ typical story and a good lesson. I've worked on many
"specialty" software packages and all the good ones started the same way, as a
one-off package designed and developed by the users for one specific business.

The best 911 software I ever saw was designed by paramedics, the best
distribution software by people who bought and sold stuff all day long, the
best medical software by doctors and nurses, you get the idea. These were all
designed with the intent to use.

Some of the worst packaged software I ever saw, OTOH, was designed by
programmers with the intent to sell.

