Buying an ISV

Once upon a time I had some spare cash, which actually happens very rarely and doesn’t last for very long and in a minute you are going to see why. I have a childhood friend who was living in Moscow at the time and was involved in developing Android and iOS apps. I thought “hey here is a great idea – why don’t I get my friend to design a good business application that I think some of my clients might need, it would be lucrative for him and would help me.” So, I went ahead and said to my friend “hey, do you basically want to be an ISV for me?” The answer I received was very surprising. My friend said that first “we do not work to order, we produce staff ourselves, which is interesting to us”, second “in the office we ride through corridors on scooters and wear Jason’s hockey masks”, and third “I like games and what you are talking about is fairly boring and I don’t really understand why I should spend my time doing your thing if I can be putting stuff out on Google Play”.

At that time I brushed this of and said to myself – “let these *&!&?*% [very interesting people] keep riding on scooters and playing games – they simply don’t want to do actual work and make it big time by working for business, what do they know anyway?”

Couple of years later I did a round of research studies, which took me very close to some companies trying to entice ISVs to work with them and I had to say to myself – “what do I know?” As it turns out, I completely misjudged my friend and the balance of power that existed in our never closed deal. My friend did not need my money and he certainly did not need my veiled promises of “good customers” that I could broker for him. Because he was the one that was in demand and I was the one in need.

This is what a lot of people do not understand, coders and app developers are no longer a disenfranchised strata of the population that is chained to a galley desks of a software vendor, being whipped to produce the next version of the flagship product or a patch. Nowadays, anyone with brains and an internet connection can find ways to teach themselves how to code and find a route to market either through a major SaaS vendor’s marketplace or even by board advertisement in their local area.

This is a revolutionary change, the effects of which are hard to overstate. Thousands of people around the world found themselves at a point where they can realize and therefore monetize their intellectual potential within months and years rather than decades. Vendors who offer the most resources for such people to be able to start themselves up are able to capitalize on this change. Vendors who are able to interest such people ideologically, make them buy in into their success story of today and tomorrow, are able to cement their hold on such people [every revolution needs an ideology.] The battle is for the ‘buy in’ from individual coders – to what extent they are comfortable with the vendor’s DevOps environment, how interesting is the market that that vendor resides in – how easy it is to continue to learn and develop if one follows one vendors’ path rather than others. These motivators and decisions are made on an individual basis and by individuals not companies.

Therefore believing like in my case, that with some money and a moderate business opportunity – one can waltz in onto the centre stage and have hundreds of undifferentiated ISV flock to you unable to contain their joy at your offers, is to put it mildly wrong. In the end I never got my app off the ground and the money just disappeared as it inevitably does. I am not sure if it is the scooters, the masks or just the whole business approach, but something has got to be different for the equation to work.

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