30 Day Challenge: Day 1
Today is the first day of my ambitious goal of building a full fledged commercial software product within the scope of a thirty (30) day period.
If you have any experience with software development schedules, you know how ambitious this is. When I add the fact that I have a firm 40+ hour commitment to a client, the idea becomes almost insane. Nutty even.
Before starting the challenge, I've already completed the following tasks:
- Product Idea - done.
- Website domains - purchased.
- Preliminary market research - done.
- Evaluated Qt and other cross platform frameworks (Qt a wonderful product, just not right for my product).
- Platforms to support: OS X, Win XP/Vista, iPhone, Palm*
Unresolved items
- Incorporate? Subsidiary? My attorney advised me to incorporate, as a subsidiary of my existing S Corp for liability reasons? Should I, or just run it within the same Corp? Are there any advantages to incorporating as a wholly owned subsidiary or just a C-corp? I think this business has a shot at becoming big. Mega-corp big. Private jet big.
- Which payment processor? Should I use a payment processor/reseller who takes a sizeable commission or process the credit cards with my own shopping cart? Payment processing solutions are taking anywhere from 1.9% - 50% (which seems excessive to me).
- I need to research everything I can about protecting and generating unlock codes.
Accomplishments/Completed Tasks
First of all I have chosen a project code name: Emerald (I'm not ready to reveal my idea just yet). I tried to come up with a pool of cool, trendy project code words, but failed miserably. I gave up and settled on gemstones -- something that takes a great deal of sweat and tears to dig from the earth, clean up, and sometimes they can even turn out to be of great value. Get it?
My first instinct when given an impossibly short deadline is to jump straight into coding. After all, documentation and design just tend to slow prolific coders, right? However, years of experience has taught me that this is not the most efficient hammering out an application.
So I threw together some wire frames in Power Point slide deck. After an hour or so, I showed them to my wife, and I am proud to say she thinks I'm a genius. I printed out the slides six to a page and then cut them out, and taped them to my lab notebook, with some copious scribbles and I figured out what I wanted to do.
Next, I made the first strategic business decision that would have a long lasting effect on my product. After evaluating several cross-platform C++ frameworks, I chose to forgo using any of them; I decided to write a native user interface application for Windows and a native user interface for OS X. I quickly generated a simple hello world project in each, and checked the code into a subversion repository.
Not bad for a first day.
I cracked open a beer and am moving on to typing up a functional specification for the software. The real coding will start tomorrow.
Labels: ThirtyDayChallenge
