Profiles - Friday, October 5, 2007 8:01 - 1 Comment

MicroISV Profile: Jonas Martinsson

By Jonas Martinsson
FeedJournal - The Newspaper You Always Wanted
http://www.feedjournal.com

[Ed. Note: From time to time I'm inviting various microISVs to come talk about the development of their products here at 47hats.com. Want to contribute a MicroISV Profile? Email me.]

My micro-ISV project is FeedJournal. At its core, it generates a PDF newspaper from RSS feeds. When I first caught the entrepreneurial itch I was happy to find out that there was a book on how to run your own one-person software business. I am very pleased to now get the chance to tell the story of my micro-ISV on the author’s own blog. The piece below is a snapshot of where I am now and how I got here.

The Idea

Being less than happy with my daily newspaper subscription’s content I started to think of ways to improve the experience for readers of traditional papers and magazines. It is clear to me that reading a newspaper on paper is matchless. I wanted to use that concept but make the content more customized for the reader. Having an RSS reader to aggregate all your favorite feeds and generate a newspaper from it would be golden.

That’s what I was dreaming of when I saw Microsoft advertising a competition, promoting their new Express software suite for developers and hobbyist programmers.

The Contest

The “Made In Express Contest” (MIEC) would has 12 finalists blogging and developing an application using the Express Editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server. The finalists would be selected, judged by the idea itself and the feasibility of a single person finishing it in a couple of months; pretty good criteria for your first micro-ISV project as well, I thought.

The idea of competing in a contest appealed to me immediately for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it would be an excellent way of getting a feel for how popular this product could become. I have heard enough crazy ideas in my days, to know that you need to test your idea on others before committing yourself too much. It would also be healthy to develop the solution in a community with other individuals, and with a set deadline. And, I was also hoping that participating in the contest could generate attention to the project.

I was of course thrilled to get the phone call from Microsoft saying that they would like to see me (out of 1,500 submissions) as a finalists. Four months of hard work later - mixed with daily blog posts reporting the project progress, working at my day-job, and becoming a father - I had FeedJournal v1.0 ready for the world to see. Considering my history of coming up with interesting ideas that never get off the ground, my participation in MIEC was critical for getting started on FeedJournal. It helped me to get going and kept pushing me forward.

After some controversy over the winner chosen by the jury, the two runner-ups, me and another guy, were both awarded the grand prize of $10,000. I don’t know if it was due to the controversy or not, but the contest was never promoted by Microsoft the way I would have hoped.

Desktop or Web?

FeedJournal v1.0 wasn’t a pretty sight. Developing a .NET desktop application using SQL Server Express Edition for the database backend (a contest requirement) made the installation check in at around 60MB, and that’s if the user already has the .NET framework locally installed. It was obvious, and no surprise to me, that people who raved about the concept of FeedJournal hesitated to download this giant. Soon after the contest was over I switched out Microsoft’s database engine.

The choice fell on SQLite, with a runtime weighing in at just a couple of hundred kilobytes. The switch went relatively smooth and FeedJournal v2.0 was launched just a couple of weeks later.
However, the number of downloads didn’t rise as I would have expected. This was troubling, after all my hard work I wanted people to see for themselves all that was possible to do with FeedJournal.

It was obvious from my server logs that a lot of visitors had operating systems not supported by FeedJournal. I launched a poll on my blog to find out why download/sales were so low. It revealed that a large majority would prefer to generate their newspapers from their browser without installing anything on the local machines. At the same time I was unexpectedly contacted by several content providers who would like to use FeedJournal to publish their content in newspaper format.

Until now I had completely been focused on using my solution as a service to readers, and now suddenly new opportunities opened up . It is fascinating to consider that I had been working on this product for a year and a half without seeing this business avenue!

That’s when I decided to start the development of a web based system: a web service for content providers and bloggers to publish articles in newspaper format, and a web site for aggregating your favorite RSS feeds and print out your own unique magazine or newspaper.

Today, the web service for bloggers is available (including a free edition), while the site for readers will be up later this year.

Marketing

Marketing is one of the more interesting games that I’ve needed to learn as a micro-ISV. I am subscribing to many of Seth Godin’s ideas, and am actively trying to find sneezers who can spread the word about FeedJournal. I am hoping that once a critical mass of bloggers will start to use my service, it will spread by itself.

Below is a sample PDF newspaper generated from my 47 Hats’ blog feed.

Jonas Martinsson is an entrepreneur, agile software developer, crossword constructor and code-breaker. He’s employed at Mainsoft, creators of the Java to .NET cross-compiler. Jonas emigrated from Sweden to Israel, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His company is feedjournal.com and he’s blogging at jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com.

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