All I was doing back in 2005 was looking for a book on Amazon, honest! I'd just finished writing MasterList Professional, a Windows personal task manager, of which I planned to sell a million copies so that I could retire forever from my contract programming job. Only one problem: I couldn't find a book on Amazon that explained how to sell those million copies. After 20+ years of dealing with clients and corporations, specs and custom apps, I knew zip about marketing, branding, positioning, software downloads, credit card processing, small business legalities, and the like. I needed that book. I didn't find it.
So I wrote Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality (Apress, 2006). It did well. I started spending more and more time talking with the kind of people I liked, comoderating a forum on the business of software, conducting interviews for a podcast, and then working for actual money with startups and microISVs (self-funded startups). Then I wrote another book (on blogging), followed by two e-books, and then created a new podcast (this time my own, The Startup Success Podcast, with the able help of my cohost, Pat Foley).
I like startups. Startup founders have a dream, a passion, a desire to make something happen, not just to do what others have done. But by mid-2007 I had come to realize three things. First, there had to be a better way to bootstrap a software business than either to hire someone expensive like myself or to flail at it week after week. From this realization was born the idea of StartupToDo.
Second, I realized that to create StartupToDo I'd have to go from being a Windows desktop programmer to being a Ruby on Rails developer conversant in JavaScript, Linux server admin, CSS—all the things I'd avoided up until then. I thought it would take six months for this—ha! Two years later, and with the help of a lot of people, I'm just about to launch.
Third, I realized that MasterList Professional, though a great program, was never going to sell those million copies and no longer occupied center stage in my life. It was time to move on from it, from Windows, and from desktop programming.
Thus I wrote this book. The Web Startup Success Guide is kind of the Kill Bill Vol. II of what it takes to create a successful startup. I have written it for all those developers who are ready to step up and create more than just an alternative to programming for money for someone else. There's a whole other story now to be explored and told, one being written by tens of thousands of developers on the Web, on mobile and social platforms, even on desktops. Right now it's a story unfolding in front of a backdrop of global economic disruption, which paradoxically makes it a great time for startups—disruption creates opportunity, engenders new needs, and changes old ideas.
I think this book turned out very well, thanks to the several hundred people who were kind enough to answer my questions, correct my assumptions, and share their experience. I hope you learn as much reading it as I did writing it, and I look forward to hearing about your startup's successes in the days ahead.