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I own a small ISV company that consist of 2 people. We sell a single product built using Microsoft web technologies (ASP/VB6, some .NET). In business for a a few years now, and with relatively stable gross revenues in the low 6 figures.
I'm considering selling the company and moving on to something else, but I'm a unclear on the best approach to to take. I'm not expecting a huge price, and I'm thinking of a gross revenue multiplier of 2 (which seems low to me... but what do I know)... so call it mid 6 figures.
Any suggestions on how best to proceed?
note: Though not directly programming related the question may be of interest to developers. I wrote the application, every single line of code (so it's not like a phb is asking). Perhaps the moderators could give the question a bit of time to see if community takes an interest.
When you say you are not clear about the best approach to take, do you mean you don't have any buyer yet ?
If that's what you are looking for, I would go first to your company's network: Who is the other person in the company, does (s)he wants to buy your share ? Do you have external investors who could be interested by buying the whole company out ? Do you have customers who could be interested (they are losing a provider after all) ? Do you have providers who could be interested (they are losing a customer) ?
If none of that works for you, I would look for the "extended" network of your company: Partner in business, if you have any (like a hardware manufacturer if you do embedded software). Look at what other software your customers are buying. If it's a very niche market and as you are sharing a customer, their other providers may be interested in buying you out for having another source of revenue with an already established commercial relationship.
Lastly, what about your competitors in this market ? If they buy you, they will mainly buy your customers' portfolio. But maybe they are willing to expand at low cost via a "merge" with your company.
It seems really like when you are looking for a new job to me: It's about using all your network first before looking somewhere else, as it is where you generally get the best results.
Best of luck.
Consider one of the "Business for sale" web sites like www.bizbuysell.com. They also have a "Find a broker" feature.
Short of that I'd talk to the professionals you use (accountant, lawyer, etc). They may know of someone who is looking for a business to buy.
One think to keep in mind is that some buyers (like me) might be interested in buying the assets of the business (the code, the client list, the good will), but not the company it self. The distinction is a fine, but important one.
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We're a medium sized engineering shop (10-20). We are great at prioritizing and structuring work on our user facing stories and making customers happy. But the cobbler's children have no shoes. If it isn't about customers, we have 0 process.
I'm looking for systems to ensure we correctly prioritize and accomplish the non user facing work to keep a dev shop running: QA environments (pretty heavy, in our case), continuous integration systems, the packaging, and so forth.
Now, resources are always limited. We don't want to give the cobblers children 10 pair of the fanciest shoes, and specialized bike shoes to boot. We want to do the right, necessary work, with the same scrummy discipline that is applied to the rest of our development.
Tell me what system works for you: how to you prioritize and organize non-user facing work ? I want systems that are simple and integrate smoothly with scrum.
(I'm aware of a red box at the top of this text, indicating that Stack Overflow's automated question parser thinks this is a subjective question that can't be answered - I think there are likely 2 or 3 excellent answers that can be or have been proven viable - and process is integral to programming. So here is some psuedocode representing our process. Fix this algorithym).
IBacklog GetBacklogForWork(IWork requestedWork)
{
if(requestedWork.IsUserFacing) return new PrioritizedBacklogRepository();
// Everything else. Priority largely based on spare time and who thinks its a neat idea
return new RandomizedPriorityRepository();
}
void HandleIncomingSuggestionsForWork(IEnumerable(IWork) ideas)
{
foreach(work in ideas) GetBacklogForWork(work).Insert(work);
}
Someone involved is using and depending on the results of the project. This is necessarily true; if it weren't true, why would you be doing it?
When you identify the person who most depends upon, or cares most about, the results of the project, you have the "user" that your project is facing. Make that person the customer.
IMO something like "QA environments" is, in a sense, user-facing work.
Quality is admittedly a "non-functional" requirement (so there isn't necessarily an associated "story"). But, you may have a non-functional requirement like "the software must be tested before it's shipped". You can assign a relative priority to such a requirement ("how important is it that software be tested?"), and then execute as usual (decide how to implement that requirement, estimate how long it will take to implement, schedule the implementation, assign the implementation, etc.).
What we do where I work is to have a percentage, right now around 15% give or take a few percent, that is spent on internal tasks that are non-user facing work. This way the technical debt is handled and if the task backlog becomes rather large then a sprint may be spent on it instead of new functionality. The way that last one would get pitched to the user or customer is that there will be a time where just maintenance and preventive work is done so there aren't any new functions coming after the next sprint.
That's one idea that can be tweaked a bit though it isn't necessarily fully flushed out yet.
The way I've seen it work more or less ok is to try to do as much as possible of the non-functional/non-user-facing as PART of a related user-facing activity, or the first user-facing activity that requires it.
This is the easiest to cope with, as it just reflects the needs of the development organization in order to maintain sustainable velocity moving forward.
Additional work which cannot be related will be done using a percentage as described by JB King.
The alternative of pitching it as an investment with such and such ROI to the PO is a theoretically sexy concept, but with real life POs I've seen it rarely works.
Its very hard to get POs to understand the investment, not to mention actually being strong enough to delay functionality for it.
Its sometimes the difficult role of the development teams to be the guys that "slow things down" in order to keep a sustainable situation.
Dev managers sometimes feel really bad about this whole sitation, regardless of the chosen approach. My recommendation both as someone who's been in that spot, as well as an Agile coach, is that as long as you feel you are doing the right thing for the business, focusing on non-functional work that is required NOW and has a relatively quick ROI, you should feel ok about this.
Cautionary note: This is an area where self-organization is really put to the challenge. Organization needs to trust the team to do the right thing, and the team needs to earn and not abuse that trust. Its a sign of maturity for an individual or a team to know the right balance.
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I have a problem to solve that I think will take 4 days, but if I had a feature request sorted and a snapshot release then I reckon I could have it done in one. Superficially this creates a budget of 3 x my daily rate to get it the feature-request actioned.
So my questions are, have you ever paid an O/S project member to fix something for you? Did it work out OK? How did you sell the idea to your manager / colleagues and where did the money come from?
Most importantly how did you go about asking nicely? Is there an etiquette for these things? Are the project leaders likely to be receptive to the idea?
In case it matters, the software with the the missing feature is a JBoss project - the home of professional open source - and I'm able to claim expenses as I'm a contractor.
At work, we've had good luck hiring open source maintainers to enhance libraries that we use.
Here are some projects we've done in the past:
We needed to integrate Quake 2 with wxWidgets. We hired Vadim Zeitlin, a major contributor to wxWidgets. In less than 4 days, he built a wxQuake2 widget by adapting the Windows version of Quake 2.
Later on, we needed portable access to raw bitmaps. So we hired Vadim again, and worked with him to produce a new raw bitmap API. This involved a substantial bit of design work, but we really liked the resulting API, and we use it to this day.
At a later date, we hired another one of the core contributors to improve wxWidgets accessibility support. As it turned out, we ended up not using this code right away, for various technical reasons. But other people have been enhancing this code since then, and we hope to use it some day.
In other words, hiring open source maintainers is a lot like hiring any other kind of contractor. But some things are a bit different, too. Here's some advice based on our experiences:
You'll have the most luck if you want to enhance an existing project and release the changes as open source.
In general, you want to hire members of the core team. They have the best track records, they're the most productive, and they have the best chance of getting your changes merged upstream.
You want to get your changes merged upstream. If you don't, you'll be maintaining a local fork, which is a headache.
Before hiring, do some research. Who works on the features you care about? Are they somebody you'd enjoy working with? Read the mailing lists and glance at the version control history, and pick out a few people to approach.
During the design phase, there may be a bit of give-and-take. The developers are looking at the larger health of the project, and you're looking at the needs of a specific business. This has occasionally made negotiations a bit more complicated for us, but the final result has typically been a better design than we would have chosen on our own.
And most importantly, don't be shy. In any sufficiently large open source project, several members of the core team will already run consulting businesses. In smaller open source projects, you'll generally find several contributors who want to run consulting businesses.
And if you're still hesitant to approach somebody, you can always ask, "Do you know anybody who'd be interested in getting paid to work on $FEATURE?" If they're not interested, you haven't put them on the spot, and they may tell you who to ask.
On the whole, we've been impressed with the professionalism and productivity of open source maintainers, and I would recommend this route for others.
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Does anyone know of any active open source projects working on political campaign management software?
I looked on sourceforge but didn't see anything relevant from the queries "political", "politics", "donations", "campaign", or in the categories "accounting", "politics" or "voting".
I'm involved with a political campaign that is currently paying out the nose for some horribly designed SaaS (whose Name i Guess i should Protect, ahem) to basically just keep track of donations people have made now, donations people have made in the past, donations people have pledged to make, contact information, the way they will likely vote, etc.
It's a bit much to manage in spreadsheets, but doesn't seem like it's something complex enough that political campaigns should have to pay for (especially low-budget local ones).
I'd love to help out if such a project exists, or start/revive one if it doesn't.
Any hints, places to look, etc are much appreciated.
Drupal CMS has modules which can probably help. Although I don't have any experience in using these modules you can look at CiviCRM.
A search at drupalmodules.com also revealed some other modules.
I don't know of any exactly. However, you could probably use some off the shelf open source solution that is not targeted specifically as campaigns. Perhaps you could use many kinds of project management or even bug tracking type of applications to help. As far as tracking donations, you should be able to find some open source project to fill this need, even if it is not that specific. You could even write this without too much trouble if needed.
Edit, here is one CRM project that purports to work with campaign management:
http://sourcetapcrm.sourceforge.net/
CiviCRM is a Drupal, Joomla or standalone software package to help nonprofits.
It can:
run mailing lists
subscribe members
process donations
manage event registration and payment
It shoudl be suitable for a political campaign
I work with CiviCRM a lot
I'm the creator of Voter Universe, a new open source web application for helping political campaigns and political organizations analyze and interact with their voter data. The application is still in active development, but we expect to have our first production release in October 2009 as well as the launch of an affordably priced hosted service.
The first release will not include donor management, but that functionality is a high priority item after the first release.
I created a screencast a few weeks ago in advance of starting to spread the word about the application at Netroots Nation. You can view the screencast at our website, http://www.voteruniverse.com
Jason Lantz
'To basically just keep track of donations people have made now, donations people have made in the past, donations people have pledged to make, contact information, the way they will likely vote, etc.': in the absense of a proper tailor made program I would manipulate QuickBooks - by creating an invoice for pledges on the date they're made while issuing receipts on the dates donations are collected; as well as creating a bank account to deposit all monies and writing checks to track all expences. The contact info part is easy. To track the way people will likely vote I will create party-items which will be used on the sales or service line when creating the invoice e.g. partyA-item, partyB-item, partyC-item etc and will pull up the specific sales/service graph to moniter vote pattern. I trust that you find my advice useful.
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I mean, this is Sakai, the open source project of a learning management system. But, really I'm clueless trying to estimate the hidden costs in one implementation project (on the technology side, not the pedagogy-stuff) in a small-medium scale institution.
Deployment (1 engineer two or three months, with experience in Java EE)
Customisation (1 engineer, 1 designer two or three months also)
Support (1 guy)
One server reasonably good with 4, 8 or 16 GB in RAM. It will host the application server, the database server, and da da! ?
???
can somebody experienced, give me advice in how to estimate the TCO in open source implementations like this? In fact, it could be Moodle, and in that case I would be lost too!
Yep, is not really a question of programming, but I think that this is one proper place to ask.
Thanks!
I work on support staff for a large uni that uses Blackboard. All the support people are students working part time, so salary can be pretty low per hour. You'll want to have someone on permanent staff as an administrator, who could also be the developer/deployment guy. Perhaps only part time if your institution is small enough, but someone who knows the ins and outs of the system will be handy when (not if) things go wrong. (Maybe you could combine them with the support role?) On that note, you'll probably want a seperate server for backups and recovery, at the least something that will backup data.
If your school is small enough, maybe one person could handle the admin/support/dev roles by themselves (my roles are both support and developent and I often wish I had admin priveleges). You could probably talk to your IT department on how much servers are going for these days, I'm not sure there or on competitive salary ranges (but students are cheap.) Hope that helps some.
Sakai Deployments lists details of some Sakai deployments, but be careful to check the last updated date as I would look a deployment data that has been updated in the last year.
I manage a Sakai deployment and all aspects are doable with one FTE, which includes full customisation and development. For larger installations (>10K users) and for more customisation, consider adding another FTE.
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I was curious if anyone out there has experience getting the necessary legal documents (user agreements, privacy policies, disclaimers, etc.) for a small software business. For example if you just want to have a software 'company' that sells a few piece of software that you have written, are there cheap solutions for something small scale like that?
In Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality, Bob suggests MegaDox.com and Soft14.com
Stationery stores will sell standard boiler plate contracts.
For software specific stuff most companies just copy the ones from bigger companies and change the name!
The suggestions by others in other answers are probably fine if you intend to stay small scale, but if your intent is grow, and particularly if you might want to have someone else invest money in the business, then it makes sense to invest in a lawyer, one who has experience in software. It doesn’t have to cost a lot if you can develop a relationship with someone interested in working with you for the long run and not running up fees on those basic documents.
By the way, either route you go, it makes sense to read the documents and make sure they fit what you’re actually doing. If you post a boilerplate privacy policy that says you do x, y and z with customer data, but in fact you do a, b and c instead, you’re creating more potential legal troubles than you’re solving.
I'm testing the waters for a crowd funded project to develop user-friendly EULAs. The EULAs themselves would be developed like open source. If a user encounters one of these "open" EULAs, then the user can feel better about agreeing it because
it's been reviewed by an open process, and
you might encounter this same EULA over and over, so you don't have to read it every time.
https://sites.google.com/a/x2xroads.com/nutshell/open-eula
I have recently been looking for the same info as the OP and found a great book which includes standard agreements for software companies which you may use as is or modify with the help of a lawyer.
The IT/Digital Legal Companion: A Comprehensive Business Guide to Software,
Internet, and IP Law Includes Contract and Web Forms
By: Gene K. Landy; Amy J. Mastrobattista
Publisher: Syngress
Print ISBN-10: 1-59749-256-6
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-59749-256-0
It also includes sections explaining issues that you need to consider for different aspects of you software business in regard to contracts, privacy and intellectual property.