My wife and I have had ideas for different ventures over the years. Because we always had a youngster in the house and not in school, we focused a lot on making the years before school started as happy years. This Fall, our youngest enters full day Kindergarten in Lake Villa, IL. This means that Mom and I will finally be able to get one or two of these ideas off the ground. We like the idea of an arrangement where I act as Architect on most projects and as a developer as needed. To this end, we are launching Friseton.com. Jean and I got to name the titles we wanted. She’s the president of the company. She’s been in charge of running the household for the last 13 years, so this title just seems right. I always liked the idea of a Chief Software Architect. Bill Gates gave himself that title when he stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO.
This doesn’t mean I get to quit my day job. We don’t have the resources to do this and, quite frankly, I don’t know that any of our ideas will ever generate that kind of income. We are hoping for something that will generate enough revenue to pay expenses and allow us to save for a more comfortable retirement. The current crop of ideas centers around things we would like to make available to charities so that they can run more efficiently. We are on the committees for a few different charities and know what we wish we had access to for coordination and collaboration. Our goal is to make something that helps all the issues one runs into and charge enough to make the services generate a positive cash flow within 18 months of our initial deployment. If annual net revenue ever got to $50,000 US, we’d be thrilled.
I’ll post news and update as we progress. Right now, Jean and I are learning SilverLight 2.0. She’s quite a bit ahead of me on this one, so it’s likely she’ll handle the UI portion of the site. You can check out where we are at by keeping tabs on www.friseton.com. If you subscribe to this blog, I promise that I’ll post updates as we make progress. At this point, the site represents a total of 60 minutes time in Powerpoint (to generate the banner) and VS 2008.
The site is hosted over at www.crystaltech.com. We have a developer account setup now. I have to say that I really like the admin tools they have. This is far better than others I have used. That said, I’ve only hosted through Verio and GoDaddy. Verio and GoDaddy were ok. CrystalTech has developed a web interface that is extremely easy to navigate. I’ve read almost no documentation and figured out how to setup e-mail accounts, FTP, etc. I like the fact that I don’t have to think too hard in order to get stuff working.
Karmic Code Monkey 