NIN-"The Slip" rolls out of my speakers, while a take a break from the last legs of my current project. You know, all the little things you do at the end of a project - tying up loose ends. Ahh, the light - I can see it.
The biggest lesson I've learned about trying to interview mISV owners? mISV owners are busy people. Yep, they keep chugging along, and may or may not get back to you. It doesn't bother me, its just definitely something within the confines of my project: Learn what makes a great mISV.
Granted, I should have a larger body of leads in the works, if I were to take this very seriously. Maybe 20 or 30 potential interviews in the mix, but like I said, I'm kinda busy myself right now. Head is down, fingers are coding. After a week or two I'll have the ability to pester some more business people into giving me some info.
So I started thinking about all the little tricks and tips I see in JOS, and other blogs, and wondering why there isn't a digg-like service for distilling wisdom. Maybe more like twitter, you find an rss feed, or forum post or wikipedia article - and you post a SINGLE sentence (or two) that distills the fundamental idea going on. Maybe a max % of the source text. Then people could vote on the best summation of text. Whatever, a passing thought.
Although, yes (I was chastised on the Business of Software forum for posting my thought), every business is different - I do see some very obvious ideas for selling software online that are very much becoming standardized and important. I started thinking about SEOMoz's list of suggested SEO ideas, with the "consensus" levels, etc - and thought - why can't we do that with selling software online?
So, I updated my great craigslist search tool - One Eye Open webpage with some of these ideas, and picked up a few sales right off the bat. It's hard to argue with that.
So, While waiting for more interviews to come back, I think I'm going to start trying to boil down what I see in the mISV forums and websites that are floating around.