My Road Block Chronicle

   In my last posts, I talked about fear, fear of failure. This just made me thought about all the road blocks I've encountered in the last four years. It was difficult and I'm sure a lot of other business owners share my sentiment

   Just to give an examle of what we've encountered while trying to hold oursevles together

Strategic Direction

·         Which way to take? Consulting or product or do consulting while developing product?

·         Consulting. Where to get business?

·         Products.  What kind of product can we develop?

·         Got business for consulting, what hourly rate makes sense?

·         Clients. What if they don’t pay?

·         Not making enough to support all the staff, what to do?

·         Too many contracts, too little time

·         Outsource or Not outsource?

·         How to hire employees?

·         How to deal with taxes?

·         Where to buy health insurance for corporation?

·         Etc

Management

·         When is appropriate to ask clients to sign off on requirements? When to charge for change of requirements?

·         Will the charges break off the business deals?

·         What if the client didn’t expect to spend that much?

·         How to distingue what’s a change in requirements and what was suppose be to in the original requirement? (trust me, the gray area is huge)

·         What if the clients drag on the change of requirements forever? They don’t’ care about the money, but it’s affecting your other business.

·         How to find a niche market for your product? What is our niche?

·         Who are our competitors? What do their customers like about them? What don’t they like about them?

·         What are we capable of?

·         What solutions do we have that is better?

·         Why are we better?

Technical

·         We don’t have the specific skill to implement this feature

·         Due to technology limitation, certain bugs can’t be fixed

·         Hard to find bugs

·         Hard to fix bugs

·         Too little time, too many things to implement

·         Code becomes hard to maintain, nightmare.

·         Re-architect application. Daunting

Marketing

·         Too many competitors, what makes us special?

·         Too much noise out there, how do we get noticed?

·         Where to drive traffic? How to drive traffic?

·         How to get our niche customers?

·         How to get people interested in our product?

·         How to interact with customer? What kind of systems do we need to setup to facilitate it?

·         How to do customer services? Can we handle customer services?

   The kind of road blocks just goes on and on.  There is a lot more to it. Over the last few years, we managed to get over them one at a time. Sometimes, we got close to the edge and almost broke down and gave up. Even now, we still have some of the road blocks listed here to get over.

   This makes me appreicate just how far we've got. As we get closer and closer to our first product launch soon ( can't tell you what it is right now),  I'm more optimistic than over. After all,  we've already overcome so many hurdles, what's stopping us? Only ourselves.