Ade in Business

I recently finished a great book by Bob Walsh, Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who’s interested in starting or is in the early stages of running a small software company. It starts by assuming you already know how to code and that you have a product idea, and goes from there to provide practical information on facilitating development, marketing the product, supporting your customers, and much more.

While I’d already heard about many of the resources Bob writes about, everything’s just packaged so nicely in the book his step-by-step approach to walking you through the process is really helpful. It’s definitely well worth the $20-30 to get the book instead of spending weeks or months with search engines and forums to get information on all the resources mentioned in the books.

My only complaint — I assume most people reading the book are bound to be boot-strapping their startup and like me are looking for as many free tools as possible to get started. I have nothing against paying money for a good tool (OK, maybe I am a little cheap), but if there’s a great free alternative out there I’m bound to try it first. There are many of free tools mentioned in the book, but I thought there were some notable gaps.

A couple examples: SourceGear and Perforce are mentioned in reference to SCM systems, but there’s no discussion of Subversion and TortoiseSVN even though they’re free and heavily used in the Open Source world. DemoCharge is mentioned as a tool for creating demos and tutorials, but nothing about Wink, a popular free tool for doing the same thing. (Bob, maybe a page on mymicroisv.com that has a list of the resources in the book, and accept contributions to make the book a growing work?)