8ore

I’ve been thinking for a long time to change the way I’m doing the job of software developer. Currently I’m working for hire as a freelancer and while it’s been a rewarding experience, now I want to try my skills also on the entrepreunial side. I’ll go from a consulting kind of work to a product based business (Even if I’m planning to keep part of my worktime for the freelance business to pay my bills in the meantime).
It has been said many many times how the moment is perfect to start a business with none to a very small amount of financing and I absolutely agree with it. The technology and the services are cheap (and you can shop around the world for them), the tools allow a good software craftsman to build services rapidly and there is at least the possibility to get noticed (even if you are not an A-lister) through the blogsphere if you do or say something remarkable.

What it is strange to me are the examples which are usually given when talking about small startups: most of the so-called web2.0 companies don’t seem to be on the market to make products which can be profitable on themself (they seem to be bulit to flip in the shortest period of time), but this is both nonsense as there are areas where there is a lack of offerings for solutions and an opportunity for someone else to come along with the right product. This will be also a bigger challenge for me since there doesn’t seem to be much innovation, or new services, coming from my own country (Italy).

I have some ideas which I’ll try to get implemented, none of them is particularly innovative neither the problems are hard to solve, yet there’s no simple and easy solution which covers the problem, or the solutions are too large and too heavy to be usable by the small businesses or private users which will be my target. I firmly believe that execution is what counts and this services will be built to be:

• Simple, simple, simple (and clean): users don’t have time to learn how a service is meant to work, so the interface should be clear and self discoverable. Ideally it should take no more than 30 seconds after login to get how to do the basic operations and start to use the service. The services will need to be distilled and the challenge will be to choose what is the essence of the problem beng solved.
• Valuable for the users: the products will solve problems for the users, they will make it easier to do some (common) task or let them save time during their work day. Moreover they’ll be cheap, at least cheap enough for the price to not be a problem in choosing them.
• Unobtrusive: the services will not try to force users to abandoon their behaviours or to leave the software they are used to employ. They will try to build on the unstructured, common gestures which are part of the way we use web today and they will definitely try to catch all the casual interactions which happen continuously on the net (especially while using email).

8ore.com will be the home for this effort but I’ll keep blogging here.