Good Software Takes Ten Years: How to avoid mistakes 1 and 2?

Question

The article Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. describes some typical mistakes in long-term software development.

Especially the first two mistakes caught my attention. How can I practically avoid those things, i.e. how can I make sure to start small?

In terms of a small user base:

The possibilities to adverties commercial software is somewhat limited on the web. You can't post them on sites like Freshmeat or SourceForge and most forums have a ban on advertisement.

The classical choice of action would be to advertise, but that might be already to much for the very beginning.

Another approach would be offering the product to selected customers you already have for other products. But that would require you to already have some customers.

In terms of a small company

How can I minimize the needed man-power? If I'm a fulltime developer things like customer care and marketing suffer, but if I do all that myself the product will suffer. But hiring an employee early on can ruin you...

Answer 1

Close your eyes and check how you feel. Do you want to MAKE MONEY FAST(TM)? That's your greedy parts talking. If you give in (and it's easy), then you're starting to cut corners. Cutting corners is dangerous; there might be some obstacle right behind the corner which will crash you.

To avoid the first mistake, start a closed beta. Google could easily attract millions of people for their new products. People are basically drooling over it. But that's not the kind of people you want to attract in the beginning. If you start with John Doe, you'll get useless error reports. "Your crap is a pile of junk! I hate it!" OK ... and how does that help? So it's a good thing to start with few users that actually care and who aren't easily offended. Who won't give up on you just because your first version has a couple of rough edges.

The second syndrome is avoided the same way: Stay clear of your greed. You don't want your success ruined by excessive expectations, the kind you get when everyone expects the next movie in a series to be "great" and then, it turns out to be "just" good. Which would be OK but people did expect so much more and now, they're frustrated.

Answer 2

There's a classic book titled Crossing the Chasm which talks about technical startups, but it's primarily intended for the corporate rather than the consumer market. It talks how to aim for a niche and to expand from there.