Making you software dreams come true
/Now is the time
It's never been easier than now to actually develop and release your first piece of software. You can do it in spare time after work or on the weekends so you don't have to wait and delay it anymore. The technology exists to help you move things faster. The only thing that is holding you back is your fear.
You are not alone in this. There are many people with similar fears - some of them are even afraid to post their ideas on the web because they think someone will steal it. But this just doesn’t make sense, we know first hand how hard it really is to make something good and useful so the huge moat that exists from idea to a real usable software is huge. Ideas are easy, it's the execution that is super difficult. I will argue in this post that now is the time to start - you can start with something and end up with a very different product and a different company. Remember you can always run a rebranding of the company once you know exactly what works. Here’s how you should start.
Take the first step
We all have dreams about making something useful, something that solves a pain, something that makes our life that much easier. That is exactly how all the software platforms around us started. It's very easy to forget that when you are in the middle of the whole thing. But it only takes a bit of research to uncover all the stories behind today's giants. And these people weren't billionaires sitting on their money before they made their products, they were just like us, with big dreams and nothing to lose. Sure there was some hiccups, maybe huge ones, but every little mistake is just another signal for you to change your idea so that it fits with what the market needs.
Start deciding now what is it that you want to make and start doing some research about what the market needs. This way you will make sure you are not wasting your time and energy on something that has already been done or that can't be done properly because there is no demand for it. Of course the last point raises the question: How do we find new ideas? How do we know that the software I'm planning will be something that everyone wants?
What do people really want?
Sometimes it is easier to find a gap in the market. This simply means that you research what your competitors have and try to analyze what they are missing or not doing properly so that you can offer the same product with more advantages. For example, there were a lot of applications for office tasks but no one offered a solution for lunch at the office easily! And that's the niche that all the food delivery platforms filled in. Food delivery disruptors like just eat or uber eats are just ideas that came by finding the gaps in our everyday life's workflows. Take this from the wikipedia article about one of the oldest food delivery apps: :Takeaway.com was created by Jitse Groen in 2000 after he had a difficult time ordering food online from local restaurants. Initially, Groen wanted to deliver all kinds of consumer goods; however, he noticed that food deliveries had the most demand, and decided to make this the company's primary focus. This is a common story for most successful apps.
Another way is to think of something that you just hate with a passion and then come up with a solution. If you have an idea, don't wait for it to be perfect - put in the time and effort right now! Chances are likely that there are many others who share this dissatisfaction with what currently exists so your product will probably find some fans. That's all you need to keep the ball rolling - some early adopters. They will give you the ideas of what else is needed to make it even more useful. What features people will pay for, what they lack in the market. Starting from a small set features leads you to take the baby steps that lead to software that people really want. Take any successful software as an example, look up their history and you'll find that they all started with a very very small set of features and they changed, updated and upgraded all the way. Do you remember how MS Word 1.0 was? It was a disaster, a buggy software that had much less features than the leader in the field then Word Star or Word Perfect. But what MS Word did was solve the pain of remembering formatting codes and use the wsywig paradigm to make users' life easy. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start.
Software is difficult. It requires dedication, creativity and endurance to make it happen. You will have to conjure up the programming language that fits your needs, come up with features for your software, make sure everything works across devices, platforms and operating systems. But if you are now finally ready to face all these challenges - welcome!
