One of the first questions a new business owner must answer is “What should I name the company?” or “What should I call my product?” In a cluttered market space it is important for your name to be memorable.

It is worth spending some time on, but don’t bang your head on the wall for weeks trying to get it perfect. Pick something that feels right and run with it. I’ll lay out a few of the ideas that worked for us. You can apply these concepts to company names, product names or service names.

There are several reasons to get a name right:

• You don’t want to have to explain the name after every meeting with a potential client.
• How do you spell that?
• You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself in to a niche or segment. Example: you don’t want to call yourself “Matt’s Tractors” if you plan to eventually expand beyond tractors to sell ATVs or side by side vehicles.
• You don’t want to have a city, state, region in your name and then move the business away from that area.
• You don’t want an offensive name in another language or culture.
• Plain words don’t stand out in a crowd.

Step 1.

Brain dump a list of names. Quantity and diversity is the key here. We focused on three questions:

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When a company decides to go with outsourcing some or all of their software development, they now get to deal with the language barrier. This is something new to a team leader for a company who manages his/her current local team in one spoken/written language. Once you are dealing with a programmer or team leader in another country, it can reduce efficiency in regard to getting any project scope understood and the job started.

This happens because of heavy accents, fast talkers, inadequate translators on the call, poor translation software being used by the offshore people. This can lead to many misunderstandings and delays if not properly managed or monitored.

If you find a company with moderate to good English skills where you do not need translators, it is a real plus. Many people in American companies think that because there were so many British in India that the India based programmers have the best chance of understanding their English, this is not always true. The British speak, read and write Oxford English and in several ways it is different from American English. In addition, many of the Indian programmers have a heavy accent and speak fast.

Filipino offshore outsourcing companies are thought to have better English because of the American presence in the Philipines for so many years. However, management usually has the best English skills and the programmers commonly having the same quality as the Indians. This can be aggrevating but they all mean well so patience is needed in extra doses to get through this.

If you manage to have an offshore outsourcing company with programmers that have moderate to good English skills, plan to patiently work with them to grow their skills to fit your needs. It will usually pay off in the end. As well, be sure to take the time to adequatly explain all areas of your expectations clearly so that they fully understand. They usually want to get the job on time and to your expectaions. If you do not make sure to go through every part of what you want, you may be let down.

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“The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouse click away.”

- Jakob Nielsen

It is really amazing how we all feel about our stuff. Stuff being our data, photo, music and video files for the most part. Even though we get all freaked out when we can’t open a document, play a song or view a photo or video; we get even more frantic when we lose our stuff. For one reason or another, we keep finding every excuse to get out of scanning our computer and files for viruses or push off backing up our stuff.

With nearly any anti-virus or backup software, there are now pre-defined defaults for scheduled system scans or backups that those companies designed because so many of us never would lift a finger or could not figure out how to schedule a virus scan or backup of our computer or files. Now that they have it automated, for whatever reason, we manage to find ways to disable it because we don’t have time or we feel our computer is crippled during the process so we can’t download more stuff. Ultimately, we end up pushing out the scheduled date for the next virus scan or backup to where there is a large gap in time between the last time it has been done.

Of course, when a virus has attacked our computer, our computer has crashed or we have lost our files some other way, it is a tragedy and we really see the cost of those songs or simply the time it took to donwload, organize, rename, categorize and/or produce all of those files. It is a good thing there is the ability and technology to recover many of those files through the use of software or in worse cases, through manual services.

Though these options are present and with the use of software they are not so costly, when recovering through manual services, hardware like hard drives, flash drives or flash cards can be very costly to ressurrect. To be as safe as possible, having a data recovery software application installed for any gaps in covereage and up to date anti-virus software as well as backup software with scheduled frequent scans and backups, we could all breathe a little easier and rest assured that the majority of our stuff would be safe from viruses, backed up or have the best chance at being recovered.

Great software talk by Joel Spolsky about creating superstars.

There comes a time when too many projects come in and the ability for the current development team to keep up is an impossible dream. What happens next is usually to determine the time to deliver the project versus the other projects that are due.

Then the questions come up, ‘Do we hire another internal permanent programmer?’ or ‘Do we hire a temporary consultant that is a well rounded programmer and can help on all of the projects?’ or ‘Do we hire a temporary consultant that programs in specialized areas for one or more of the specific projects?’ or ‘Do we look to outsourcing to a development team to take on one or more of the projects?’.

No company usually wants to nor can afford to walk away from a project. With the current state of the economy, most companies are less likely to turn down a project and also less likely to hire another employee.

Several companies are looking to outside consultants on a short term or even long term basis to get that extra work taken care of. Lately, even more companies are taking the route of using outsourcing due to general versatility and costs.

The offshore outsourcing development teams can be found mostly in Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Even though one would think that software programmers should be the same when using the same programming language no matter where they come from, that is not usually the case.

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Skype – used constantly to keep in touch across multiple countries
Basecamp – simple project management
Highrise – simple contact management
Salesforce – might drop it and solely use HighRise
WebEx – might switch to CampFire
Twitter – 140 characters of conversation
Google Apps – Gmail, docs
Google Chrome – quick, simple browser
Thunderbird – plays well with Gmail
Dropbox – simple way to share large files
Blackberry – best email/sms/phone/gps on the go.
Slacker Radio – Pandora is getting too pushy
WordPress – simple blogging software
Subversion – version control for our apps

There is allure for a young software company to use a software publisher to springboard in to retail. They’ve got connections, a distribution network, and deep pockets.

All you have to do is give them a gold master, some content and you can sit back and collect royalties every month. Publishers generally negotiate a 15% – 20% royalty to you. Their costs are artwork, boxes, marketing, travel, advertising, etc.

The idea is that you’ll negotiate a decent cut to collect enough royalties, build cash and then take over and enter retail across the board on your own. The stakes are larger, but it takes more money to play and the competition is fierce.

Without a strong online presence what makes you think you can handle retail on your own? It is important to do customer development and build a base of success if you chose this route. Unless you have a popular product, software publishing hardly ever works out in your favor.

Giving a publisher non-exclusive rights to your brand is dangerous. They can hurt previous relationships, take over your social media presence and you never know what is going on with revenue and box counts without an audit.

A better use of your money is to focus on how your customer finds and buys your product. Maybe it is only through organic search? Maybe your customer only shops at a Fry’s or MicroCenter? Maybe your customer is an iPod owner and you do biz dev with an iPod accessory company?

Where I DO think software publishing makes sense is in International markets. Using a publisher from another country is a great way to get access to new customers without having to have the relationships (especially Japan), the localization experience and you probably don’t have the means to do the constant traveling needed to set up the operation.

It is too often that all of us as consumers take for granted the effort and cost that goes into any given product we may purchase or use. In regard to software, it is something we may feel that we need but shouldn’t pay much for, in fact many times the question is asked, why pay for it at all?

In today’s economy, there is little money to go around and something free is appealing, but if it could mean loss and further cost to cover the loss, it is surely something to think more about rather than making a quick decision.

Ultimately, a good percentage of the same people that ask why pay for it, end up doing exactly that, they pay for it in loss of their time, loss of their files, the computer stops working, the computer becomes very slow, they get a virus or some other malware, etc…

On the other hand, there is a good percentage of freeware out there that has the makings of great software and could potentially be great one day once they get enough resources and money to take the next steps needed to grow. Many great companies started in their garage or school dorm room with one person and grew their software to be some of the most recognizable names in the software industry.

The truly greatest companies may not be the largest or the most recognized, they just do the absolute best they can to fill the needs of the customer and sell their product for the best deal possible so that it is affordable to everyone.

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