Going full-time
At the beginning of this adventure, back in October, I said I’d work 3-6 months part-time, then I’d have to make a decision about whether to go full-time.
I guessed right. I’m four months in, and I’m going full-time from today onwards.
That doesn’t mean, by a long shot, that I think Macrobug is going to be a success or bring me any income in the near future. If anything, it’s the oppposite – I wasn’t getting anywhere part-time so I need to work harder at it. That doesn’t really come as a surprise.
My early blog posts (gosh, I hate the word blog – maybe I’ll change this page to Macrobug Diary)… My early blog posts stated quite a few obstacles that might completely have sunk the whole thing. These included technical problems, saleability problems and relationship-with-Symbian-or-Nokia problems. I was expecting one or other of these to totally, unarguably, doom the whole thing. Much to my consternation, none of them have done so, so I’ve had to make more “squishy” subjective decisions about whether I think it can work.
My conclusion is – I still think the business idea is sound. I think there’s a need for greater intelligence in debuggers, and I think that a business can be built up around it. I also think that doing it on Symbian OS first makes sense – it’s so much easier.
So, I’m quite pleased that after a few months effort I still think the business is valid.
However… the scale of the task is appearing more epic with every moment that goes past. Although I knew from the beginning that it could take years to make a viable income out of it, I genuinely thought I’d be able to knock up some sort of prototype in a few months, which I could demonstrate to Symbian and to potential customers. That prototype, in itself, is now seeming like a nightmare long project. There’s too much technical uncertainty, and every avenue I turn down seems to be a blind alley – I run up against limitations in Symbian OS, or Eclipse, or Carbide, or something else. I knew from the beginning that I’d face big performance problems, shifting around so much data. They were worse than I feared.
Anyway, it’s this paradox of potentially good idea versus lots of trouble actually doing it, that makes me need to go full-time to see whether it works.
Hopefully at Easter I’ll be a bit further down the path. My stated aims for the next two or three months are to get that prototype working… or at least, have worked out all the remaining technical uncertainty points so it’s just a clear run of development until I have something working.
We’ll see.