• The genius of niches is they are too small for large competitors, allowing a nimble entrepreneur the breathing room to focus on an underserved audience. Once you’ve succeeded in that niche, you can leverage your success to establish credibility for your business to move into larger markets.

• Millions of people in this world can build software. A fractional subset of those can build software and convince people to buy it.

• A developer who knows how to market a product is a rare (and powerful) combination.

• With an enormous amount of anecdotes to back me up I strongly believe that building something no one wants is the most common source of failure for entrepreneurs.

• Today, he makes a tidy monthly income from this application. Ruben has no plans to leave his job, but enjoys the extra income, the control he can exert over his own project, and the experience of learning how to build, launch and market his own application.

• His long-term goal is serial Micropreneurship and eventually, self-employment.

• The other 70% is debugging, optimizing, creating an installer, writing documentation, building a sales website, opening a merchant account, advertising, promoting, processing sales, providing support, and a hundred other things we’ll dive into in later modules. Some of it is great fun…other parts, not so much.

• Software entrepreneurship is a fantastic experience. The first time someone pays you for software you wrote, your head will nearly spin off its axis.

• It’s hard to re-train your mind out of the dollars-for-hours mentality. For me it took well over a year.

• It’s a long road to becoming a successful entrepreneur. There will be many long nights, especially in the beginning. It’s critical to know what you want out of entrepreneurship so you can make the right decisions along the way, and to give you something to hold onto when you’re burning the midnight oil for the fifteenth night in a row.

• Written Goals – “Those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.” 2. Public Commitment – “…those who sent their commitments to a friend accomplished significantly more than those who wrote action commitments or did not write their goals.” 3. Accountability – “…those who sent weekly progress reports to their friend accomplished significantly more than those who had unwritten goals…”

• Strive to build a startup that generates $500 per month in profit. This may sound like an easy goal, but will require more work than you can fathom at this point. Once you’ve done that you will have so much experience under your belt you won’t believe how much you know (and how little you knew when you started).

• Most developers start as salaried employees, slogging through code and loving it because they never imagined a job could be challenging, educational, and downright fun. Where else can you learn new things every day, play around with computers, and get paid for it?

• If you are the typical developer, you will not have enough money, power or fame to generate demand for a product people don’t need or don’t know they need.

• The up-front fear is a big indicator that you’re going to grow as a person if you proceed through it. And, frankly, the terror wears off pretty quickly.

• It’s true. Surprisingly, anything is much easier the second time. And the third. And by the fourth time you can’t even feel the hair on the back of your neck, or the sweat in your palms because it’s no longer there. The terror goes away surprisingly quickly.

• It’s a huge confidence boost to look back at the things that scared you last month, last year, or even five years ago. And realize you conquered them.

• Another common distraction masquerading as productivity is reading business books.

• You can’t consume and produce at the same time – when you’re in high-producing mode you have to temporarily step away from your magazines, blogs, and other forms of distraction for a while. Being in the pattern of checking your RSS reader every time you sit down at your computer kills hours of productivity each week. Those are hours that could be spent building your product.

• Anytime you’re on your computer ask yourself “Is this activity getting me closer to my launch date?”

• It never seems like a good idea to pay someone out of your own pocket for something you can do yourself…until you realize the economics of doing so.

• Boring movies, bad TV, and pointless web surfing are expensive propositions. If you aren’t enjoying something, stop doing it.

• It’s amazing that we think we can remember our important thoughts. Due to the amount of information and chaos you consume each day, a thought stays in your head for a few seconds before it disappears. Perhaps you will think of it again, perhaps not. Writing down important ideas is critical to building a list of ways to improve your business.

• Functionality, code quality, and documentation are all a distant fourth. I know that this sounds sacrilegious to a software developer, but unless you’re marketing to software developers, your order of importance is market, marketing, aesthetic, function.

• Finishing a software product is a great feeling. The night you roll the new bits to the production server is indescribable. The feelings of relief, joy, and accomplishment are some of the most rewarding parts of developing software.

• The first month you launch you will be lucky to break $100 in revenue.

• If you’ve ever been a manager you probably like process and understand its benefits. If you’re a developer you probably dislike process or see it as a necessary evil.

• That something can be dry cleaning services, invoicing software, or hosted salesforce automation. What matters is finding a group of people who need your something more than they need the money you’re charging for it.

• It’s that simple – if you can find a small group of people and make them amazingly happy, you will make money.

• If you’re over 400 hours, take a serious look at eliminating functionality to shorten your time to launch. This is the most common mistake I’ve seen with 1.0 products – too many features and too many months between the start of development and launch.

• At 15 hours per week, 300 hours means 20 weeks of your free time, or 4-1/2 months. At 550 hours you’re looking at 8-1/2 months. Think about how much time that is – it’s pretty incredible to think about spending most evenings and weekends for the next 8 months building a product and generating no revenue during that time span.

• All of them should urge the user to take an action that gets them closer to providing you with their email, trying your demo, or making a purchase.

• When it launched, the iPod’s hook was “One Thousand Songs in Your Pocket”

• To find your hook you can take one of three approaches: 1. Explain what your product does and for whom. Such as “Simple proposal software made for designers.” 2. Make a promise to the customer espousing a benefit of your product, such as “Save Time. Get Paid Faster.” 3. Describe the single most remarkable feature of your product, such as “One Thousand Songs in Your Pocket.”

• Finding a niche, launching, setting up AdWords and SEO, email marketing, support…the more knowledge you gain in each of these areas the better all of your products become. The first time I built a mailing list, it instantly occurred to me that I needed to build mailing lists for all of my products. These tools scale infinitely; once you learn how to wield one, it can be applied to every product you launch, whether you own a consulting firm, an e-commerce site, a software product or an ebook.

• Experience holds up and will earn you much more money if you can leverage it across multiple products.

• Keep in mind there are many adjustments to that number. If you have a generic parked domain name that gets a lot of type in traffic you can garner 24-36 months of profit, or a particularly high earning website that’s well automated can bring 20-24 months. Websites that require a substantial amount of ongoing work can go as low as 2x or 3x monthly profit.

• From these thoughts we realize that the open market places value on profit and automation much more than technical capabilities, features, raw traffic without revenue, or web design.