marketing for geeks

... But I do admit that a big problem happens when a geek becomes the founder of a software product company. Suddenly the geek must do a whole bunch of stuff they were never trained to do. Somebody has to keep track of the finances, make the coffee and devise clever ways for management to mistreat the employees.

Luckily, a lot of this "non computer science stuff" is fairly intuitive. We've got no training on such matters, but if we can figure out how to write a multithreaded network server, we can probably rent some office space without screwing it up too badly.

Is that what you are thinking ... ?

here we go :

So you proceed to build your killer app. Of course, you are terrified that somebody else will discover your amazing idea, so you keep everything a secret. You setup a small office in the corner of your basement and paint the windows black. You tell your wife you are downstairs looking at porn so she won't get suspicious about what's really going on. Not a single human being on earth gets a glimpse of your product until you are finally ready to unveil your 1.0 release. You emerge from stealth mode and wait for the world to overload your web storefront with traffic.

But the orders don't come in. Several months go by and eventually you realize the truth: The reason nobody else was selling this kind of product already is that nobody really needs it. If any substantial number of people were willing to pay for the solution you created, then somebody else would already be trying to relieve them of their money.

He gets it right. And this is something everyone should pin on a big wall before setting up a software company. We have got it printed in gold on the toilets door.