The current incarnation of this website is one year old today, happy birthday ianmjones.net!
Although ianmjones.net has been around for a few years with a blog like appearance, it wasn’t until September 30th 2004 that I started to properly “blog”.
Since last September I’ve always intended this site to stay on track, to talk about how things were going with my quest to become an independent software vendor (ISV). I’m not sure I’ve managed that very well, I seem to have strayed quite a bit, really haven’t written a lot about what I’ve learnt along the way and haven’t written as often I hoped I would.
What have I achieved in my first year?
- I’ve read and listened to tonnes of marketing and business material in many different forms of media and from many sources (which I’ve failed to talk about here when I really should have, slap my wrist).
- I’ve researched and picked suitable tools to develop, source control, package and sell my software.
- I have designed and developed a software application in a programming language and with other tools that I hadn’t used before.
- I’ve learnt a lot about the FogBugz database schema and data usage and installed it way too many times on far too many platforms!
- I’ve registered something like 35 separate domains and set up the websites.
- I’ve set up an online store to sell my software (visited a few times by people, but never used the way it should be).
- I’ve set up a few channels for public communication, such as the Newsletter and Yahoo! group (there’s a proper forum waiting in the wings).
- I’ve released three public betas of my software, with the second and third showing a lot of improvement over the first!
- I’ve even released some open source code as a by-product of my software development.
- I’ve met (in a virtual way) a lot of really nice people from all over the world.
- I’ve had very little sleep compared to the year before, and seen a lot less of my family too (this isn’t a good one).
- And tonnes of other bits and bobs that escape me just now.
Some of this stuff I’m very proud of, some not so. But having a real direction in my life and being able to continuously step closer towards my goal of becoming an ISV while having lots of support from my family and friends, and new friends too, has made this a fabulous year.
Really looking forward to the next year, it should be good.
Congrats! My one year of blogging is coming up next month as well and my list looks surprisingly like yours. It’s always good to see another Ian doing well
Posted by Ian on September 30th, 2005.
Congrats! Keep at it!
Posted by Michael Sica on October 6th, 2005.
Congratulations!
As you may notice the little link I’ve put, I recently joined the ‘ISVs’ world and reading you convinced me starting my blog about it. So, I wish you good luck for the ‘year 2′ of your adventure and let’s hope I will be able to say as many positive things in a year
Posted by antonio on October 18th, 2005.