I enjoyed reading Eric Sink’s articles. He is a fellow developer, blogger, and entrepreneur. He recently wrote an article “Make More Mistakes” about many of the costly mistakes he has made in the course of his entrepreneurial endeavor. He has been successful in starting SourceGear and is listed in Inc Magazine’s Inc 500 award list.

Like him, I am a developer, blogger, and entrepreneur, though I am not as far advanced as him. I have been involved in entrepreneurship for about a year so far, but I am not out of the product development phase and still need another year.

I started out in entrepreneurship about a year and half ago. I have essentially not had a full-time job for three and a half-years, except for a six-month contract with Microsoft which allowed me to reconnect with my former coworkers and learn what Microsoft has planned in Longhorn and Whidbey, so I can prepare for it in the future. Two of those years have been spent pursuing an MBA in entrepreneurship and one year so far on software development. The MBA degree taught me more about business, while my former development experience at Microsoft taught me about the software development process and revealed to me potential opportunities to create new software that integrates with other Microsoft products.

Starting a software company is fairly lonely. I try to maintain a network of various people, such as former Microsoft co-workers, former MBA classmates, other developers and entrepreneurs. I also maintain a blog and read other blogs because it provides another great means of social contact with other talent people of like interests. One thing I missed about Microsoft was the smart people; but the blog community makes up for that.

I am not really a risk taker. The biggest risk was my decision to pursue entrepreneurship. After that decision, I am actually very conservative.

I have budgeted so far for another two or three years, and I will be able to go for longer if I need be. I always have that option of contracting for six months and living on half my salary. I have taken care of my health insurance, rental and other needs, and purchased all the necessary equipment and software that I need. I just need to develop the product now.

I try to keep a balance. The decision to take the leap doesn’t mean I have to give up some necessary comforts of life. I allow myself vacations and modest entertainment for morale. It turns out that after going through two years with a modest lifestyle in the MBA program, I discovered that living life doesn’t have to be expensive; you just need to get rid of or manage the overhead. The founders of Yahoo mentioned that their graduate school experience showed them that it is possible to live comfortably on $20K a year; I’m not going to mention my expenses, but it’s not far from that. Cash is important, so it is important to make sure money doesn’t get tied up.

I looked at why businesses failed in the MBA program. I addressed each type of failure. I am not too worried about management or financial risks—I have very low overhead. I do worry more about mitigating technological and marketing risks—about making sure that I can deliver a reliable, useful product that consumers want.

My technology does rely on AI, which have a history of failure, but I use proven AI and know why other companies have fail. I have a number of backup plans that preserve the investment of time and effort in creating in the product. The work going into the primary product is reusable, so that I can develop other categories of application from the original technology. It seems to me 80% of a product is the infrastructure, which can be reused multiple times. I am wary of becoming a one-product company and am aiming for a family of different products.

In thinking about the marketing risk, I looked at products that already exist in the market, that would be completely and dramatically made obsolete, under the theory, that if my original strategy fails, I could always price and market my product in the same exact fashion as the existing products are marketed. I estimated the size of the markets for those products at least in the tens of millions.