Writing yesterday's post (which isn't yet posted because it turns
out Aussies.space isn't back to accepting SFTP connections yet)
seems to have firmed my resolve for business success quite
significantly, even though I started it by questioning why I bother
worrying about money in the first place. This morning I've been
thinking about my 'big' website idea more seriously than I have for
a long time - I might even try to find the messy bit of scrap paper
that I plastered with dot-pointed ideas for it years ago.
I'm mainly thinking about performance considerations. Minimum
investment is always my aim, and with a website the running cost is
directly associated with the software efficiency, so if I come up
with the leanest possible configuration from the start, it should
save me money later. How to decide on how long to work on this
stuff though? Ideally all the original ideas would be implemented
from the start, so that features don't unnecessarily need to be
crammed in later. On the other hand, I went that route with my
online store and it's painful how much effort I put into
implementing, and thereafter supporting, features that I've never
used due to physical problems with making their corresponding
phisical products economically. Then later I did cram in extra
features for selling products that _nobody_ ever bought there in
the end anyway. It makes me sad whenever I work on it now.
So I implement everything I can imagine then never use half of it,
then maybe nobody ever takes any interest in the features that I do
offer anyway. Or I make some core implementation and aim to build
the rest later. The latter is obviously the common way to do
things, but there's no way that I'm smart enough to work out all
the right provisions to allow extra features to be bolted on
efficiently later - the only way to get plans right in software is
to implement them, at least so long as I'm involved.
The one thing that I do have in my favour is that I don't need it
now. The basic idea for this website has been in my head since
sometime when I was still at school. It may only be because nobody
else in the world thinks it's a good idea, but nobody's really done
it yet, so it may be safe to continue taking my time. Then my only
real deadline is that I need to have it making money before all my
other income streams fail. Mind you, it's impossible to tell when
that will be as well.
All this uncertainty is really why I've never started working on it
already. But I've wasted so much time on smaller projects that
never went anywhere, maybe I should just try to wedge this in
alongside those others? I just wish it wasn't yet another project
involving me sitting at a computer all day.
