Since selling my business last year, I’ve been looking around for my next venture - in the meantime I’m selling services to keep bread on the table. Services are great, but the revenue model is limitted - it doesn’t scale the way I want - revenue is limitted by the number of hours in the hour. I’d rather be generating revenue while I sleep. Wouldn’t you?
This article explores both the business and technology issues of a new startup - code named “Stonezoup”. Wearing both hats, I will shift back and forth - compromising, grumbling, lying awake at night, excited to take the next step.
Being a technologist who was ran software companies, I hope this series will help my fellow technologists chart the journey from a good idea along the path towards a substainable venture. The mixture of skills required can be daunting, and usually the science of “what step comes next” can be as much about the art of asking the right questions.
What we need is a framework - a framework that embeds the questions we should be asking ourselves, when we should be asking them. Our business framework will take the form of documents. Each with their own purposes “to help us make good decisions”. Those decisions will result in actions, of which some will be businsess actions, and some technology.
Our technology framework is RoR - for I know of no better framework or community for building this particular kind of app - a service offered over the web through a web browser.
Being just the intro, we’ll halt there. Next we’ll look at how we take that germ of an idea and turn it into something actionable.