Micro-ISV Tip #9: A conversation with Eric Sink.

I recently interviewed Eric Sink, Software Craftsman, CEO & Founder of SourceGear LLC. Back in September 2004, Eric was running his successful source control software company and writing a column for Microsoft’s MSDN site on the business of software. Eleven columns on, Eric’s column “Exploring Micro-ISVs” hit a nerve with me and many other developers looking for a way to describe our as-yet unnamed business model.

Eric is also the moderator for Business of Software forum at Joel on Software (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz), a longtime haunt and great information source for people starting micro-ISVs.

Q. Tell me about SourceGear – did it start out as a micro-ISV?

A. First of all, I would have to confess that calling us a micro-ISV was not quite accurate – although I coined that term, I’ve never succeeded at running a micro-ISV.

Q. Okay…

A. The real stars are people like Thomas Warfield, with the [Pretty Good] Solitaire game (http://www.asharewarelife.com/), he’s made millions off that game, I think. When I started out, it was as a one-person company, but purely with the intention of doing consulting. I had no intention of building something or a product and I ended up doing both.

Q. When was that?

A. SourceGear started in early ’97.

Q. When you started and you were basically a one-man company, what type of consulting?

A. Just kind of rent-a-brain type of work, I guess you’d say. Hiring myself out to do contract development, advice on development, things like that. Primarily, I was just writing code as a hired gun.

Q. Been there, done that and have the t-shirts. So how did you go from “I’m a happy contractor” to doing a product?

A. Well, the first thing that changed was that about 2 months after I got started, the company I previously worked for laid off all my former co-workers. So all of the sudden there’s 40 people I know well out of a job. So I started talking with them and the idea of hiring one or two of them started to get some airtime. Anyway, by the end of that year, I’d hired seven of them. And we were doing contracting.

Along the way, our first product was not my idea, it was somebody else’s. In fact I tried to shoot it down because I did not think it was a good idea. But to make a long story short, we’re still shipping it today.

Q. Was that the application you sell that let’s you do Microsoft Visual SourceSafe remotely [SourceOffSite]?

A. That’s right. It really all started because we used SourceSafe as our source control tool and one of our guys commutes from an hour away, and he wanted to work from home sometimes and couldn’t. So he wrote this tool, and people started talking about shipping it as a product, and before you know it, we did.

Q. So basically, it started out solving a problem you had, and then you realized that you had a really good solution here and other people had the same problem?

A. That’s right.

Q. That explains how SourceOffSite came to be, but how did Vault come to be?

A. Vault happened because from the day we built SourceOffSite, we understood that Microsoft could kill it by simply adding remote access to SourceSafe. We have always believed that SourceOffSite is say one year away from being stopped by Microsoft, but the thing is, they kept not doing it. After 3, 4 years of SourceOffSite shipping, we had accumulated a pretty large number of SourceSafe customers who were also our customers.

Microsoft was just not doing much with SourceSafe, and some of our customers started planting the idea in our heads, ‘You know, you guys ought to just create a replacement for SourceSafe, because Microsoft clearly isn’t doing anything decent with it.’ And we had thought about it ourselves, plus being prodded by our customers, we decided to just go ahead and do it.

Q. So you developed Vault, started selling it in February ’03. Were your first customers the people you’d already been selling to?

A. Yep.

Q. I never ask people how much they’ve made because I never get an answer. But has Vault met your sales expectations?

A. It has – significantly – exceeded our sales expectations. We went into this thinking, this might be a decent idea, but the response from customers has been quite a bit larger than we ever expected.

Q. So how did you come up with this micro-ISV thing?

A. I was writing a column for Chris Sells at Microsoft. After writing my first few columns I somehow got it into my head I wanted to write about the notion of a one-person company, partly because I had talked to several guys doing this one-person company thing, and some of them were a lot more successful than anyone thinks they are.

So, partly, I wanted to shine a light on their success, and kind of spread the word that a one person company can accomplish more than you might think even if they never grow more, and if they do, it’s a great way to get started.

So I sat down to write this article after I dealt with the research; one of the things I wanted to tell you in this phone call, and I cannot find it, is that I am quite confident from memory that the article was changed at the last minute – I had another term for micro-ISV. The day before I submitted it to my editors, I decided I didn’t like the term and changed it to micro-ISV instead. But I don’t remember what the other term was!

Q. What’s been the response to that article?

A. The overwhelming response has been positive. I get mail almost every day from somebody telling me about their micro-ISV, their product idea, I get requests to review business plans. I mean, I get a steady stream of enthusiasm from people who say, ‘You know, I like this idea, I want to do a product of my own!’ That aspect has resonated with people. Now Winnable Solitaire, that’s a whole different story. That was my little stunt to basically give me an excuse to write an article.

Q. Halfway between that article and your Winnable Solitaire experiment, you started moderating the Business of Software Forum at Joel on Software. How did that happen?

A. No big story there. Joel asked me to do it one day, and I said, “Sure”. I would consider Joel a friend and I’ve known him at somewhat arm’s length for several years. It was the kind of thing where we knew each other fairly well so I did.

Q. I’m curious, how long does it take you to moderate this forum?

A. Oh, not very long, I pop into it once or twice a day. The forum is to some extent self-moderating because he’s got this Bayesian filtering thing that actually filters out a lot of the spam. So most of what I do is just confirm that the system has properly identified something as spam.

Q. Sounds like a no-brainer, or at least a lot easier to moderate than some of the forum software out there…

A. Yeah. The real issue for moderating the forum is not administration, but to actually being a valued contributor to the forum by posting my thoughts and opinions. And that takes more time. And frankly, I don’t necessarily do a very good job of it, but I try to chime in on questions every now and then.

Q. Let’s go back to Winnable Solitaire for a moment. There’s a question on the forum right now: whatever happened to it?

A. [laughs] Well, it still sells!

Q. That’s good! Would you be willing to say how many a day?

A. Oh, it doesn’t sell a copy a day. The revenue from it has been insignificant. I spent more on a dinner last week than I’ve made with Winnable Solitaire in total.

Q. So was it just to illustrate the article?

A. To be honest, I thought it might sell more than it has, but it really was just a stunt to write an article. When I talked to Chris Sells about the article, I said ‘Hey, everyone else has sample code on MSDN. I write about the Business of Software, what do I use for a sample?’ A sample product, so I did one. I was able to justify the time spent developing it because for totally unrelated reasons I needed to learn the wxWindows API anyway.

Q. There was one other thing I wanted to ask you. A couple of your articles talked about “transparency”. What’s been the reaction to that, and do you still feel that transparency is the right way to go for micro-ISVs?

A. I don’t think a blanket statement like that makes sense. I can say a couple of things I do think make sense as blanket statements.

Q. Please do!

A. Every micro-ISV needs to figure out what level of transparency makes sense to them and not treat transparency as a bool or a checkbox. What I do think makes sense in the general is if you are not willing to trust your customers, your customers will figure it out and they won’t trust you.

Now does that mean trusting your customers means the same thing for every company? No. But its an attitude that has to be thought about. In our case, since we are software developers and our market is also software developers, transparency has a bigger advantage for us. It’s like trying to sell car repairs to people who know how to repair cars – they want to know.

Q. Okay, by the way, how big is SourceGear now?

A. A little under 20 employees.

Q. Any advice for anyone starting a micro-ISV now?

A. One thing I would say is that’s its worth the journey.

Comments

[Brandon Doyle]

Bob Walsh,

Thank you. Well done.

[fakeGeek]

Good One:-) I am not aware of other interviews of Eric, can you point me to some, if any?