Niall’s virtual diary archives – September 2003

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27th September 2003

Creating a business

Saturday 27th September 2003: 9.28pm. Coo, end of September. Didn't I say that I'd have my library finished by now? Well, I might have done, but then I went to visit Enterprise Ireland about getting some funding.

They pointed me to these two good books called "The New Business Road Test" by John W. Mullins and "A Good Hard Kick in the Ass" by Rob Adams. Now both of these books have proved useful because the former especially has a set of domains within each of which you must answer a number of questions and it was precisely this kind of formalisation of putting my case forward to investors that I needed (and indeed have been seeking for many months). It also highlighted that one must do market research before presenting your case - it's no good to simply state "there is an emerging trend of cross-platform development", you must prove you have a clue. After all if I were investing 100,000 of my own money, by god I'd want as many statistics and proofs available as possible - not just some fellow saying it to be true.

So in the sense, the books made me think about things I hadn't previously considered, and this is good. The bad is that market research takes fucking ages (and I very rarely use expletives on this diary, so be aware of just how much ages I mean!). For example - when trying to prove that there is an emerging trend of python use, I had to take the full set of analyses of web logs from python.org (and my thanks to its web admin) and laboriously enter each of the figures by hand into a spreadsheet. It took me four hours, just to do that one little single tiny piece of research

And obviously since to prove cross-platform development, you need many more than just python. It takes weeks, literally. And it's soooooo boring. OTOH, I can tell you that python use is increasing at an average of 163% per year which I and no one else would have known otherwise

Anyway seeing as my work need not be replicated by other poor sods, I'm going to put a copy of some of it online here. Hopefully google will pick it up and it'll appear if you do a search - I chose relevant key words so we can be hopeful.

Ok, back to research - I reckon pretty much every assertion and leap of logic I make (which are many) need backing up. Be happy!

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