Lessons learned from 13 failed software products « Successful Software
I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got excellent 12 responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small sample and biased by self selection, but I think it contains a lot of useful insights.
Related cards:
Selling your software in China « Successful Software
The first thing I need to say, right off the bat: Chinese users will not buy your software. Period. That does not mean that there is no money to be made, it simply means that they will not pay for your software license.
Lessons learned from implementing Highrise's custom fields feature
We recently added custom fields to Highrise which allow you to keep track of extra details beyond standard contact information like phone, email, address, etc. After the launch, we had a “looking back” conversation to see what lessons could be lea...
If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough « Successful Software
I cringe every time I hear about someone who has spent years writing their ‘killer app’, but still hasn’t released it. My preferred approach is to get a solid, but minimally featured, v1.0 out there and then iterate like crazy based on real custom...
How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products
features are pre-sold without any option to negotiate what’s important and what may be left out, you inevitably end up with too much complexity. Such pre-sold features not only tie your hands, but the client is also not able to change what he need...
Build vs. Buy
A common question in IT departments is whether to provide a capability by building custom software or by buying a package. If the business process you are supporting is part of your competitive advantage you should build custom software, if not yo...
15 criteria for evaluating software product ideas
Choosing the right product to develop is crucial. Great execution is also very important. But if you develop a product that no-one wants or no-one is prepared to pay for, then you are going to fail, no matter how well you execute it. You can often...
Five years of "Today I Learned" from Josh Branchaud
The linked GitHub repository is a bit like our "dev" cards deck, but groomed from a single person (Josh Branchaud). It includes an extensive list of over 900 TILs on many topics that might be interesting for most of us. (e.g. Ruby, Rails, Git, Uni...
Why UML Fails to Add Value to the Design and Development Process « Learning Lisp
UML is applying an abstraction at the wrong end of the problem. It is primarily used to sketch object models for inferior languages.
Sending errors to sentry from development
For the initial setup or changes in the sentry reporting it might be useful to enabled reporting of sentry in development. Don't commit these changes and prefer to report to the staging environment. As other developers might be confused of these e...