Hi all,
I’m a software developer and I’ve been in IT for over 20 years professionally. I want to focus my weekends and time when I’m not at work building a company but I wanted to build a piece of software that I can focus the company around.
The problem is I have no creativity, I don’t know what to make. I do however intend on spending the next 20 years everyday adding to this software. Where do I start? If nothing else, if I can build something that would allow me a 100k income then I’d be happy to do it full time for those 20 years as well.
Any comments/recommendations/flames welcome :)
Start by looking at the market and statistics of what software people or companies are making money on.
Then, look at how they market and sell it, and what offer they present to their customers. Reverse engineer the customer journey.
Now you still don’t start programming(!). You wanna first create your own offer through one of the viable marketing channels you created. But instead you’ll ask people “If I had x-software, would you buy it?” Or if youdon’t do in-person or telesales you run test-ads online or in newspapers to see whether you get the expected clickthrough rate of people being interested.
Once you figured out that way what people want, you start building a small low-effort prototype and give it to the most-desperate, early-adopter cusomers.
From there you improve the software bit by bit making it more and more delightful for the cusomers to experience. You may have to pivot into a new customer segment or a different application after you gained some knowledge and experience about the market