A wise woman once told me about the KISS principle that she learned while in the Navy. She wanted software that could help her keep track of documents while on the job. She only needed the software to have a certain set of core features. All other “nice to have” features such as reporting and complex sorting were not needed according to her. Why was this?
The company I work at is a huge, so they don’t mind spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for IT stuff. Us small guys do not even have an IT budget. ClearCase and ClearQuest and anything Microsoft are simply to costly! Anything dealing with PHP, Linux, MySQL and SVN is probably cheaper or free and best way to go!
Since, I had to spend quite a bit of time seeking out the below software tools and services, I thought it may be handy to list the tools we used for anyInput. The below tools are free or low cost.
In a previous post, I called co-workers on the job and the job itself mediocre. While that statement is true, I am NOT saying that employement is a bad thing. Having a job is useful since you gain experience and may learn a thing or two. Sure, the learning may be slow, but you still learn a few useful things. After all, I did and still am!
I once was told by a seasoned entrepreneur to “continue working at your job and you will see many unresolved problems. These problems spaw ideas, potentially ideas that you can start a business from.” On the job, while learning about many aspects surrounding a device, I noticed that my company still uses paper records to log information about indivdual devices. Often times they need to search through large file cabinets to find a particular device’s history. Sometimes, they are unable to find the records.
An open source project called anyInventory provided inspiration for the development of anyInput. See the anyInventory homepage here. anyInventory seems to be no longer maintained as of March 2005.
anyInventory is very similar to the first product that I made. It had alerts, multiple users, was customizable and was very simple to use. Here is a testimonial for anyInventory:
Merry Christmas! …….I mean happy holidays (politically correct) Anyway, the idea for anyInput was growing in my mind for about 4 years before I decided to begin developing anyInput about 10 months ago. The sources of the idea are work, anyInventory and my first product attempt.
One of my main reasons for starting my own thing is so that I someday I may be able to escape the life of corporate mediocrity. By ‘corporate mediocrity’ I am calling many people at my job mediocre.
One seasoned entrepreneur I talked to a several years ago made the statement, “The world is full of mediocre people. So I hire people late and fire fast.” Later on, while at work, his statement started to make sense.
In case you do not know, I am an engineer at a large fortune 500 company. The job is decent, the salary is adequate and I am solid with many co-workers. So why in the world would I even consider starting my own thing? One textbook from an entrepreneurship class that I took in my Masters program says people become entrepreneurs for different reasons. Here are some:
So a here is my first real post after launching anyInput a little more than one month ago. For the last month, I have been trying to market the site with only small success. Looking back, I should have put more thought into marketing aspect instead of engineering.
However, I am an engineer by profession and have no problem in executing the technical aspect of the anyInput. So a couple consultants and I choose a development framework, created a scalable software architecture using multiple servers and blah blah blah. Since I love the technical stuff, I will eventually talk about experiences designing anyInput.
It should also be mentioned that during this effort, I made the conscious decision to focus on the technical stuff and not the business aspect. One reason was because the technical stuff is easy for me to grasp and think about. Another reason was because focusing on all aspects at once put me in a spin and would probably not allow me to complete anything. Was this the right decision? Only time will tell.