Well, I am taking a new direction. This blog has been private for a few months. My partner and I were using it to communicate software ideas and do pro/cons of those ideas. However, none of them were ever fleshed out.
So I have gone through and deleted all those posts and made the blog public again.
I am also still looking for my killer idea. Mainly this is still looking at what “pains” I face day to day at work. One of the big pains that I have been dealing with has been in keeping track of passwords. I am an ops tech for a large telecom company. As part of my job, I have to interface with multiple systems (both internet/intranet and legacy systems). Most of these systems do not use the standard NT login. They each use a username of different lengths, have different password requirements (length, complexity and number of stored passwords before you can reuse them). One person that I talk to regularly in the company keeps his usernames/passwords in a Word doc. Another has post-it notes plastered over his monitor. I have kept mine a little bit safer (I email them to myself).
None of these are good solutions to the problem/pain. So I hacked a simple VB.Net program together that encrypts everything and stores it in a XML file. But it is definitely not ready for primetime! So I could clean this up and try marketing it. But the market is definitely full of password managers. What would be my USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? If I were to try marketing this, I would definitely go for the corporate market (not B2B though). What I mean is that I would market it as ideal for a business user to purchase. They would not need admin rights to install it, as it would not need to be installed to be used.
January 12, 2007 at 12:21 am |
Hi Michael,
Two things that have really been hard fior me so far:
1/ Coming up with the Killer Idea that you are happy with
2/ Converting that thought (once you find it) into the commitment you need to make it happen.
My biggest problem was that I had an idea, started writing code. Dumped it. Had another idea, started writing code. Dumped it…
It’s a real internal struggle.
January 12, 2007 at 8:37 am |
Sounds like we have both been down the same path.
The hardest thing for me is coming up with the idea. I have dumped code over and over. The worst is when I decide to scrap the code I have written and completely re-write it.
I just need to make up my mind to finish one project. I think once I get to that point (finished and available) that the really fun stuff will start (marketing, SEO, etc).