Outer Level

Month: December 2005

  • Erik Sink and the micro-ISV

    Erik Sink coined the term “micro-ISV” back in September of 2004 when he decided to write about “Exploring Micro-ISVs” and his experiment with a shareware game called “Winnable Solitaire”. Erik inspired tons of entrepreneurs to launch small businesses to pursue their dreams of success as micro-ISVs (including me). His article was so popular that the […]

  • Gus On Indie Success in 1068 Days

    Gus Mueller, owner of Flying Meat and maker of Vodoo Pad and FlySketch fame has taken the time to share his story of becoming a successful indie shareware developer in this article: How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days He’s included a terrific list of seven and a half lessons learned, a […]

  • Objective-C and Cocoa Articles

    Just sharing some great essays on the nitty gritty of Cocoa and Objective-C that have all popped up in the last few days. A new episode in Wil Shipley’s Pimp My Code series where he refactors a reader’s class in his own special style. Ridiculous Fish takes a look into the underpinnings and efficiencies of […]

  • Xcode Secrets Uncovered?

    One of the most confusing things I’ve experienced in my short time developing software for the Mac is managing projects and their build and compile settings in Apple’s free development IDE, Xcode. Xcode is built on top of the cross-platform, open- source compiler gcc. Since gcc is a command-line tool, Xcode needs to handle all […]

  • Startup School and Wiki

    These resources made the blog rounds a while back, but I just now got the chance to really look into it. Startup School has a bunch of great presentations on starting a business in both pdf and audio formats. There is everything from general advice through finance advice. The related website, Startup Wiki is just […]

  • Corporate Army Or One-Person Business

    Do you use “we” or “me” when speaking for your MicroISV or one-person small business? Is it better to act as if you are bigger than just one person? Or, is the fact that you are one person actually a distinct business advantage? Yaro Starak discusses his thoughts on which way to go on his […]

  • Customer Support Woes

    Why is it that some companies just don’t get it? Twice in the past couple of months I’ve experienced absolutely terrible service from large companies in completely different industries. My wife and I recently cashed in a few whole life insurance plans. The company my wife’s plan was with simply required one phone call and […]

  • Marketing in Forums

    Wil Shipley recently went on a rant about “Sock Puppet Marketing”. Apparently, he has a “competitor” on the Windows platform that is marketing his software in forums that discuss Delicious Library. This was one of my concerns with posting to forums and blogs with an obvious intent to marketing a product. This is essentially spam.

  • Generating Forum Noise

    Gianfranco Berardi brings up some interesting thoughts on posting in forums. At one point I realized that I really shouldn’t talk like I knew what I was saying when I didn’t really know about the topic… Which was good because I didn’t spend so much time on the forums and was able to direct my […]

  • 10 Questions for Small Business Owners

    Rajesh Setty [Life Beyond Code] has written up a nice concise list of 10 Questions to ask yourself when you are small. …it’s not always the right answers that help – it’s asking the right questions. Article found via MicroISV