The 30 day "release or die trying" challenge (day 0)

Fellow Micro-ISV owner Patrick McKenzie (the MicroISV on a Shoestring guy) has issued a challenge to design, build, test, release and market a new commercial product within 30 days.

If you work in software or know anything about software development schedules or the process of software engineering or project management you’ll appreciate that for even a product update, a 30 day schedule is a very ambitious timeframe, especially if your goal is to develop a full commercial software product or service in June for release to paying customers in July.

Over the past week, quite a few of my fellow ISV owners have decided to join Patrick’s hellish quest to turn “June” into do-or-die-trying month. It’s not as if I’ve got a lot of free time with existing product maintenance releases in progress and other planned work, but as it turns out I do have this one idea…

The Idea

My goal is to develop a software service which allows software developers to easily monitor their desktop software by providing online logging for error reports, anonymous usage statistics in order to track software usage patterns as well as issue alerts (email, SMS) and custom reports based on data returned by a software developer’s own programs integrated with this service. This service is an extension of technology that my own Micro ISV already uses to monitor and collect error reports but will do so in a more usable and easily integrated fashion; allowing users to “log in” and view their software statistics and error reports in the same way in which website owners can view their website statistics online.

The benefits to the software developer are enormous. This is a turn-key solution to proactive error reporting, software usage mapping (logging usage “hits” from around the world), custom data collection and alerts (e.g. send an email to developer@mycompany.com whenever a high priority error is received). From experience, proactively fixing bugs based on detailed error reports directly from my own software products has brought big benefits. Every week I check my own online logs for the top three error or bug reports – and fix them. I also use my own existing online tracking database for my larger Enterprise level commercial software to track software usage and get feedback on who is evaluating the software and also where and when it is used (for those who are interested, this is by sending a HTTP POST at startup).

I do have a very slight head start on this project, and I’m going to need it. The technology already has one major commissioned customer (another software company) as well as expressions of interest from many others. I plan to make the entry level version of this software service completely FREE, and offer the paid for features at a competitive price just enough to cover the running costs of the service and to invest the profits directly back into the service in order to grow it.

The Technology

A lot of the original thought for this has already been documented, and the first (rather expensive!) server on which this service will be offered has been purchased, together with the domain name. Unfortunately not a single line of code has been written and I’m using ASP.NET 3.5 – a technology more or less completely new to me. I’m a veteran .NET 2.0 developer and I hope to explore the new features of the 3.5 framework as well as learn a whole new development paradigm (that of website active server pages). This might give me an advantage, although my website design skills leave a lot to be desired so I may have to hire help to get some graphics made. Any recommendations?

The Progress

• Product Idea – Done
• Product Name – Done
• Website Domains – Done
• Website Hosting – Done
• Functional Design – Done

and to do:

• Technical Design – Nope 
• Technical Coding – Nope
• Technical Implementation – Nope
• Technical Testing (in-house alpha stage) – Nope
• Website Design – Nope
• Beta Testing – Nope
• Marketing Plan Implemented – Nope

Time Left – 30 days.

The Other Projects

How can I follow the project’s progress?

You can follow my progress by:

• Visiting this blog regularly
  (https://www.mikewilson.cc)
• Bookmarking a link directly to the 30 day challenge category on Mike on Software
  (https://www.mikewilson.cc/category/30daychallenge)
• Subscribing to the feed for this category
  (https://www.mikewilson.cc/category/30daychallenge/feed)
• Or following my progress along with the others on this aggregated feed
  (http://feeds.feedburner.com/30dayers)

You can use RSS to subscribe to the automatic feed for any of these blogs (as well as this one) or subscribe to this feed (), which is an aggregation of all the above feeds into one.