It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, so I thought it was time for an update.

Anyone who has been involved in a startup knows how all-consuming that can be. We also have a blog over at BuildingWebApps.com, and I’ve been writing a bit both for that blog and for the core of the site. But most of what has been consuming my time is crafting a business around the technology we’ve been developing.

Christopher Haupt and I founded Collective Knowledge Works, Inc. last fall, and our first venture was to launch BuildingWebApps, a resource site for Ruby on Rails developers. We also started the Learning Rails free online course, which began with podcasts and has evolved into a series of screencasts, in which we build a Rails application step by step. It’s been tremendously popular, with several thousand people following the course. It’s a lot of fun teaching this way, and seeing how much value people get from it.

We considered building a business around serving the web application developer community, but we’ve decided to keep this as a side project, rather than the core of our business, because we want to build something that we believe we can scale into a more significant company.

In thinking about the application we built to create the BuildingWebApps site, we realized that it has a much broader potential use: building a resource site on any topic. We think of it as the next generation beyond blogs and content management systems. We’ll offer this as a hosted service, enabling anyone to build a site like BuildingWebApps, on any topic.

The next question was which customers to focus on. We found that, as a horizontal technology platform, it was hard to explain to people, and hard to come up with a focused marketing strategy. Some customer groups we looked at include:

• Infopreneurs: people building web-based information businesses
• Passionates: individuals or organizations who are passionate about a topic and want a platform for communicating their knowledge and engaging the community
• Businesses: businesses for which educating their customers and prospects is important

After lots of analysis, we’ve decided to focus our initial product on the last of these categories: in particular, on small businesses. There’s a lot of customer pain here that we can address, and a lot of value that we can provide. Most small business sites are awful, if the business has a site at all. The model of going to a local web developer and building a site from scratch is expensive and painful, and almost always results in a largely static site with no community features.

We’re going to provide a platform to make it easy for small businesses to create powerful sites that engage their customer community and become valued information resources that attract new customers. There’s lots of pieces of this that go beyond what we’ve done at BuildingWebApps, and which we’re not quite ready to talk about.

We may also have versions of the platform for the other two customer categories, and they may be the source of significant long-term growth, but they won’t be our initial focus.

We’ve raised a little more angel financing to take this to the next level, and we’ll be launching the product in the fall. There’s a teaser at the embryonic Collective Knowledge Works site. If you’d like to be notified when we have the private beta ready, please enter your email address there.

It’s been a fascinating process getting to this point. It’s been a year and a half since I left Adobe and gave myself the flexibility to pursue various interests and see what bubbles up. A lot of threads have come together now, and I’m really excited about where we’re heading.

After several months of development, we have finally taken the wraps off the BuildingWebApps site!

Note: I won’t be publishing any more Ruby on Rails or web development articles on this blog. This will be more of a personal blog, with everything related to web technology going on the new site. To continue receiving the Rails articles that I and my colleagues will be writing (and we have plans for lots more articles than I’ve been able to publish here), please subscribe to the BuildingWebApps articles feed.

You can also subscribe to the BuildingWebApps blog, where I’ll be writing about the process of building the site and the business.

State of the site

BuildingWebApps.com is still very much a work in progress, but we’ve gone ahead and opened it up so we can get feedback. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

We worked with Josh Woodlander and Ethan Allen at Raspberry Media on the visual and interaction design, and I think they did a fantastic job. It was a joy to work with people who have such a strong sense of graphic design and who think deeply about the challenges of effectively presenting lots of information. And Ethan is a wizard at making all the browsers behave reasonably. (Any oddities you see are probably the result of my modifications.) If you’re looking for a team to take on a significant web design project, I highly recommend them.

My goal is to build this site into a valuable resource for the Ruby on Rails community, and for people who want to learn Ruby on Rails. Over time, we’ll increase our coverage of other web-related technology as well.

The site includes both original articles and an annotated, organized set of links to hundreds of other resources around the web. We’re in the early phases of building up the content, so I realize that it will seem a little thin in places (and if you’ve read the Rails-related articles on this blog, some of it will seem very familiar). But there’s lots of great stuff to come.

I’m really interested in feedback on the usability of the site. You can also submit suggestions on the site to help us build up the content.

How is this a business?

In case you’re curious about the business model: we plan to make all the core content free indefinitely. At some point, we’ll add some premium content that will require membership or a one-time payment. We’ll probably have advertising. And we’re offering seminars.

Longer term, we believe that the application we’re building to power this site will be applicable to many other knowledge domains and communities. Blogs and wikis are all the rage, but they both have huge limitations that we believe our platform will overcome.

Don’t forget to change channels

Once again, please note that I won’t be publishing any more Ruby on Rails or web development articles on this blog. I will continue this blog to write about a variety of topics beyond web development, so please keep your subscription here if you’re interested in my random thoughts. But if you subscribed to this blog primarily for web development information, it’s time to move on:

• To continue receiving the web development articles that I and my colleagues will be writing, subscribe to the BuildingWebApps articles feed.

• To read about the evolving business of which BuildingWebApps is a part, subscribe to the BuildingWebApps blog.

Thanks!

One year ago today I embarked on my current adventure, leaving Adobe after five years there and two years creating the startup they acquired, Fotiva. At the time I left Adobe, I had only the fuzziest idea of what I was going to do, but I knew it would be related to the web, and I was pretty sure it would be connected to Ruby on Rails. And that it has turned out to be.

I’m as busy as I’ve ever been, and my income in the past year is the lowest it has been in more than 25 years. But I’m having a great time, and I have a good feeling about where things are headed. I thought I’d take the excuse of this one-year anniversary to look back on my decision to leave Adobe, and catch my readers up on my business thinking.

Looking back on Adobe

I’ve not written much about my experiences at Adobe, in part because I want to avoid any possible appearance of breaking confidentiality agreements, and also because I wanted to gain some perspective first.

Looking back on my five years at Adobe, there’s a lot that I’m grateful for. I learned a tremendous amount about digital imaging and the PC software business, and about life inside a big company. I met a lot of great people, was able to immerse myself in digital photography, and had the opportunity to lead a research team and do technology licensing with the power of a big player behind me. The team I helped build for Fotiva continues on, in large part, as Adobe’s Santa Rosa office, and I’m pleased to have had some small role in growing the software business in the North Bay. And the product that started life at Fotiva has an enduring role as the organizer in Photoshop Elements.

In a strange way, though, I’m most grateful to Adobe for being so thoroughly dysfunctional when it comes to enabling innovation that it drove me out. As someone with a entrepreneurial heart, I found Adobe stifling. If I had been able to accomplish a bit more at Adobe, I might still be there, and then I would have missed out on so much.

To a large degree, the challenges I faced finding happiness at Adobe would be there in any businesses at that scale. But not entirely. Many of the other entrepreneurial folks I met at Adobe, who tried valiantly to build new products and services, have also left. They’re at an assortment of small companies, but also at Google, and Yahoo, and Apple.

One of Adobe’s biggest weaknesses, in my view, is the distance between top management and the people who have passion for innovative new product ideas. It is exhausting, and usually dispiriting in the end, pushing ideas up through a chain that, at it’s pinnacle, doesn’t seem very interested.

The difficulties I had getting new concepts to market at Adobe, especially when they were web-related, are symptomatic of top management’s resistance to exploring new concepts in the marketplace. Adobe doesn’t like to accept the risk of new markets in return for a role (and learning opportunity) as an early player. Perhaps at Adobe’s scale their approach of waiting until market opportunities are clear, and then buying their way in as needed, makes sense. But it did not make for a satisfying place for me to work.

My evolving Ruby on Rails business plan

When I left Adobe, I had done a little Rails development, and read a lot about it, and I felt strongly that it was going to be a big deal. I spent the majority of this year building custom Rails sites for small businesses, and set up Topaz Web Solutions LLC as the home for that work. I enjoyed it, and some of it is ongoing, but my focus has now shifted to Collective Knowledge Works, Inc., the company I cofounded this fall with my partner Christopher Haupt.

I spent quite a while looking for ways to build a business around delivering Rails-based solutions to other small businesses. I continue to believe there is a great opportunity in this domain, but the sales and support challenges are significant.

Collective Knowledge Works grew out of an idea I had to create a portal for Ruby on Rails developers. We’re now deep into doing just that: you can sign up for the beta list at BuildingWebApps.com. Within a couple weeks, we’ll be letting in beta testers, and early next year it will be public. I can’t wait to show it off, and I think it’s going to be a great resource for the Rails community. After eight years away from the editorial, publishing, and training business, I’m glad to be back in it.

Initially, we don’t expect BuildingWebApps.com to generate much revenue directly. Our first revenue stream will be from the Ruby on Rails QuickStart Seminar that we’ll be presenting in February in San Francisco. Later, we believe we can create revenue from the site itself in various ways.

Christopher and I have just launched the Learning Rails podcast, which has been an adventure of its own.

There’s a bigger plan in the background, too. All the technology we’re building for BuildingWebApps.com can be used for any knowledge domain. After we’ve had time to build out this first site, we’re going to develop additional knowledge domains, and enable others to host their own knowledge domains. That’s why we named the company Collective Knowledge Works.

It’s great to be back in this early business-building phase. And it’s wonderful not to have to try to sell new ideas up through multiple layers of management, but simply to decide what to do, and then do it.

For the past several months, the majority of my time has gone into a web application for a startup called Accreditation Helper. The marketing site went live today, and next week the product will be shown publicly for the first time at the Medtrade show in Orlando.

This web app forms the heart of the business for Accreditation Helper, which assists Home Medical Equipment companies …

See the full article on my Topaz Web Solutions LCC blog.

It’s been awfully quiet here on the blog the past month or so… but that’s only because life here in the physical world has been busy, busy, busy.

I’ve been spending most of my time on a large Rails application for a start-up client. In another few weeks, I’ll be able to tell you about it.

I’ve also been formalizing my web development business as Topaz Web Solutions LCC. I’ve been operating as a sole proprietor until now, and it was time to pick a name and create a better legal structure. (The Topaz name, incidentally, has no particular significance; I was just looking for something short, memorable, and not already used, and came upon this after starting with Ruby.) I’m booked up through October, but would be glad to hear about any projects that could start after that.

I’ve also been hard at work on a resource site for web application developers, and I’ll be telling you about that soon.

Six months into my exploration of Ruby and Rails and the opportunities it represents, I’ve settled into a niche of building web applications that enable small and medium service businesses to better communicate with their customers.

Today, very few small service businesses have web sites that do much for them. Typically, if the business has any web site at all, it is mostly brochure ware, with a contact form as the limit of its interactivity. Yet almost every such business has interactions with its customers that could be facilitated by a customized web application.

For example, health care practitioners must deal with requests for appointments, referrals, records, and prescription refills. The office staff then needs an effective workflow to process these requests.

Accounting, financial services, and design firms have other needs; they typically have confidential documents they need to provide to their clients, and they need data from their clients. A web application can provide a much superior and more secure alternative to email.

There are countless other examples of businesses that could significantly improve their interactions with clients and customers via the web. But the vast majority of them have found it too intimidating and too expensive to implement the web solutions that they need.

I’ve found that my experience running small businesses makes it easy for me to understand the needs of these kinds of businesses and craft solutions that work for them. The Ruby on Rails platform dramatically reduces the time, and therefore the cost, to build these systems. And since I’ve now built several such applications, I have a set of building blocks to draw from that further streamlines the process.

In time, I expect to offer off-the-shelf hosted solutions for certain types of businesses, but for now I’m finding that each business has different needs. The best approach, for now, seems to be building a custom solution using building blocks that I’ve already created, plus new ones as needed for a particular business’ needs.

If you know of a business in need of such an application, please send the my way: ms (at) mslater.com, or 707.829.6447.

This week we went live with a medical office application (built in Rails) that I’ve been working on for a few months. It is focused on patient communications (not records) and is designed to replace lots of phone-message interactions that leave patients and staff frustrated.

The site handles requests for appointments, referrals, prescription refills, and records transfers, as well as payments. We are providing this as a hosted solution, initially for medical practices but quickly expanding to address other service businesses.

The live site is www.doyleparkfamilymedicine.com. Feel free to browse, but don’t fill in a request form unless you’re a patient there!

There’s a sizable admin site that is not, of course, publicly visible. This is where the staff processes the requests that patients submit on the site. It tracks the history of each request and sorts them into queues for the appropriate staff person.

If you know a service business that is interested in having a site like this, with a much smaller up-front cost than has previously been possible, please send them my way.

I moved to the hills near Sebastopol, in Sonoma County about an hour north of San Francisco, almost 17 years ago. We came for the rural lifestyle and the natural beauty. The one thing I’ve missed is the technical and entrepreneurial community that thrives in our old town, Palo Alto, and in all of Silicon Valley.

For most of the time I’ve lived in Sonoma County, I’ve remained intimately involved with businesses based in the valley. Although I’ve always had an office up here, I’ve also spent a few days a month in the valley, and most of my contacts remained there.

When I decided to leave Adobe last fall, I also decided to seek out the local technical and entrepreneurial communities and get to know them better, in the hope of making new friends and forming a new venture that would be truly centered here in the redwood country. Along the way, I’ve joined a few groups and created one, and met a lot of great people.

There are many, many talented folks in Sonoma County, but they tend to be isolated, and often connected to businesses in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. I believe we can create a much stronger environment for entrepreneurs and technical people here by providing more opportunities for us to all meet each other and share ideas and dreams.

Announcing the North Bay Internet Society

After looking around for a group of like-minded folks to join, I couldn’t find one—so I decided to create one. The North Bay Internet Society (NBIS) is about to have its third meeting, and our membership has grown to a little more than 20 people. It’s a remarkable group, including several technologists, a few marketing folks, a couple people helping run established web businesses, and a few people building new web startups.

We meet once a month, over dinner, and have a couple short, informal talks and lots of discussion. I’ve enjoyed it tremendously, and I think most of the other members have as well. I’ll be surprised if the relationships forming there don’t lead to some long-term collaborations. Our discussions sometimes veer into technical issues, but our focus is on delivering value to people from the technology, rather than on the technology itself.

It was striking to me that as I asked around for people who might be interested in this new group, I kept finding new people who didn’t know any of the others in the group. This reinforced my feeling that there are a lot of people up here with common interests, but they typically don’t know each other. I hope that this group can help change that.

If you’re interested in joining us, please send me a note telling me a little about who you are, to ms (at) mslater (dot) com.

North Bay Ruby User’s Group

At about the same time, Rob Orsini (author of the Rails Cookbook) and Keith Fahlgren from O’Reilly founded NBRUG, the North Bay Ruby User’s Group. The first meeting was held a couple weeks ago, with about a dozen attendees. This is a much more technically oriented meeting, and it is focused on a single technology platform (which happens to be my favorite one!). So it is quite different from the NBIS, but equally valuable. This group meets on the third Thursday of every month at the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol. See their web site for more information, or join the NBRUG mailing lst.

North Bay Angels

Another group I’ve become involved with is the North Bay Angels. This is a group of people interested in investing in small businesses. It has a very different character than the two groups listed above, for several reasons. First, it is focused on business, not technology, and the deals discussed run the gamut from wine to biotech. Second, it is well established (founded in 1999) and much larger (about 80 members). And finally, it is relatively expensive to join and attend, plus you need to be in a position to make at least small private investments, so it tends to be an older, more established crowd, with lots of people from the legal, financial, and real-estate worlds.

I’ve found NBA to be a great place to meet a diverse group of people interested in building (or helping others build) businesses. It also provides a wonderful peek into some of the startup businesses seeking financing. If you’re interested in becoming a member, see their web site for more information.

More North Bay Groups

I’ve found a couple other north bay groups that seem interesting but which I haven’t had time to visit yet. Among them:

• North Bay Linux User’s Group

• Sonoma County Web Developers

There’s lots more in Marin County, but for now I’m trying to focus on groups that meet further north.

If you know of any groups to add to this list, please add a comment to this post.

I think there’s a great opportunity to make Sonoma County more of a center for web development and entrepreneurship, and I’m grateful for the chance to help move it along.

It is often said that failures are more instructive than successes. In this spirit, I’ve done a lot of reflection on what went wrong at Fotiva, my previous startup that we sold to Adobe at the end of 2001.

In many respects, Fotiva was a success. We succeeded in building a great team, funding the product development, creating a breakthrough photo-management experience, selling the company to Adobe, and delivering this experience in the context of the Adobe product line. So there’s a lot to feel good about.

From the perspective of building a sustainable company, however, or delivering the returns venture investors look for, it must be admitted that Fotiva failed.

Our focus on was on providing a complete solution that would enable consumers to move from film to digital photography without adding lots of complexity. There were several environmental factors that were in our favor:

• We believed that consumers were about to make a massive transition from film to digital cameras. This indeed happened. A transition of this magnitude seemed like a great opportunity to build a new business.

• People already were accustomed to spending time and money on their photos, and the transition to digital, which was driven by the appeal of the cameras themselves, required consumers to adopt new tools and methods. So we didn’t have to convince people to take on an entirely new activity, and we didn’t have to be the driving force in causing them to make a change.

• Existing imaging software was largely focused on editing, whereas the major need of consumers was to collect, find, and share their photos, which is where we focused.

Sounds like a great setup, right?

The immediate problem, which led to the sale of the company at a modest price, was that completing a second round of financing in the fall of 2001 was impossible, despite having a nearly completed product and a great executive and engineering team. In a less hunkered-down investment climate, I believe we would have been able to complete this financing round. The venture community was licking its wounds and trying to salvage companies in which it had large investments, which made it almost impossible for young ventures to raise money.

There were, however, deeper and more enduring challenges that would likely have limited the company’s potential even if it had been funded. These issues also constrained the future of Fotiva’s software within Adobe.

The most fundamental issue was this: given an even marginally usable solution for free, most consumers will never look for a better one.

When Fotiva’s software was released, in evolved form, as Photoshop Album, Adobe was able to make only a moderate success of it, despite the huge draw of the Adobe name. There’s a lot that I think Adobe could have done to make it more successful, but the biggest problem was inherent in the market.

Once someone reached the point of considering purchase of a piece of photo software, many (if not most) would purchase Photoshop Album. The product won the category, such as it was. But the overwhelming winner in the category was nothing—at least nothing that wasn’t free. The vast majority of people simply used the capabilities built in to Windows XP (or iPhoto on the Mac), or the software that came with their camera, or other free solutions (most notably Picasa). While annual sales of digital cameras skyrocketed, sales of digital imaging software remained relatively stagnant.

In addition, we found that convincing people of the superiority of our approach was tough. Changing entrenched habits is very hard. Once users became accustomed to working with their photos as native elements in the file system, it was challenging to convince people of the merits of the database-oriented approach. To be sure, there are downsides as well, and there were some problems in execution, but nevertheless I believe far more people would benefit from this approach than were willing to adopt it.

I took from this experience these lessons, among others:

• Providing a superior solution to a real problem at an affordable price isn’t enough to capture a market, even with a great brand on your side. If there are adequate free solutions, it is very hard to sell a superior solution in large quantity.

• Even if users have a real problem, if they don’t perceive that it is a problem that better software could solve for them, there isn’t much of a market. Having the best user interface means nothing to people who never give it a try.

• A great piece of software doesn’t necessarily create a great business. In most cases, consumers simply don’t consider buying software. And service revenues, while attractive in theory, can take a long time to develop to substantial levels.

Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time.

I had a great job at Adobe. There were a lot of exceptional people I had the pleasure of working with. I’ll miss working with many of them, but I’m sure the relationships will endure. I’ll miss being in the digital photography industry, though I think I’ll enjoy it even more as a hobby.

I won’t miss the shrink-wrapped software business model, the isolation from strategic decision making, the split between marketing and development silos, the financial tyranny of being in a public company, and, most of all, the too-small box I felt I was in.

Seven years ago (on Thanksgiving day, in fact) I had the idea for a photo appliance, and registered the PhotoTablet domain. A couple months later we raised a round of financing and started a company, which evolved to be a PC software company and was renamed Fotiva. Two years later we sold the company to Adobe, where I’ve been for five years.

I’m starting on my fourth career. First I was a hardware/firmware engineer; then a newsletter publisher and conference producer; then a manager of software development and research. Now it’s on to building a business based on web applications. I think it’s a bigger opportunity than anything I’ve done in the past.

I’ve just reached the end of a seven-year adventure into software for digital photography. The adventure began with my first digital camera, a Nikon 950, in July 1999. My frustrations with the difficulties of working with digital photos on the PC led me to conceive of a digital photo appliance, a “photo tablet,” during the Thanksgiving weekend that year. In February 2000, my cofounders Ken Rothmuller and Bernard Peuto had signed on, and PhotoTablet was incorporated. A couple months later, we closed on $2 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, thanks to the vision of general partner Stewart Alsop.

During the next six months, we realized that our tablet appliance concept was ahead of its time. Our product plan evolved by September 2000 to be based on a PC application, and by early 2001 we had built a great executive team, including CEO Jim Heeger and VP Marketing Tanya Roberts (both now at PayCycle). We renamed the company Fotiva, and set out to raise a second round of financing to bring the product to market. Alas, the fall of 2001 was the worst of times for raising money, especially for a consumer-focused digital photography company. We ended up selling the company to Adobe Systems in December 2001. The software that we built at Fotiva turned into Photoshop Album, and then into the organizer mode of Photoshop Elements.

Along the way, I learned a great deal about the photo industry, the shrink-wrapped software business, and life in a big company. It was a grand adventure, but I’m thrilled to now be returning to the world of building a small business.

View the Fotiva web site, captured for posterity as a PDF file before it was taken offline. (Keep in mind that this is more than five years old now, so many of the external links and email addresses no longer work.)

As I’ve been exploring what kind of business I want to build, I’ve found my thinking settling on hosted applications for small business. Here’s my reasoning.

I believe hosted applications are the future of computing. As I’ve noted in some other posts, connectivity isn’t quite as universal as one would hope, but this will only get better in time. And in many situations, such as in virtually any business office, connectivity is rarely a problem. The availability of great open source technology means the software infrastructure is nearly free. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails make it dramatically easier to build web applications, while AJAX toolkits and tools such as Adobe’s Flex greatly lower the barriers for building great interfaces.

From a business model perspective, hosted applications have the advantage of being subscription businesses. If you can provide a service that your customers come to depend upon, you have an annuity. With shrink-wrapped software, on the other hand, it is getting harder and harder to get customers to keep buying upgrades year after year.

Another huge advantage of hosted applications over shrink-wrapped software is the ability to evolve rapidly. Instead of big releases that come once every year or more, releases can happen monthly or even weekly. And by watching the analytics, you can have an intimate, constantly updated view of what your customers are actually doing. The agility of small companies provides a big advantage over large organizations in providing this kind of product.

Having settled on the hosted application space, the next question for me was which customers to serve. I’ve spent the last seven years building products for digital photography consumers and hobbyists. As much as I love this domain, I’ve concluded that digital photography makes a better hobby for me than a business opportunity. The digital photo web space is tremendously overcrowded already, and customer acquisition is a huge challenge.

Neither do I want to join the masses of consumer-focused Web 2.0 sites. Building a great consumer site is a high risk proposition—sort of like deciding to be a rock star. No matter how great the site you build may be, and how hard you work, the chances of making it big are small. YouTube was a huge success, but how many other video sharing sites are going to see a big payday?

This line of thinking has led me to focus on small businesses. VCs generally don’t fund startups in this space, so there’s a much saner competitive landscape. Most small businesses today get very little value from their web presence, if they have one at all. There’s all this great web technology available, but it is out of the reach of the vast majority of small businesses.

I see a lot of opportunity in building focused web applications for small business niches, closing the gap between what Internet technology makes possible, and what ordinary business owners are able to use. I’ve been helping out some local businesses and looking at what’s available to serve them, and the existing solutions are generally far more complex than they need to be, deliver too little value, and have a lot of missing pieces. This seems to have all the ingredients for building a great startup.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of months thinking through potential opportunities for building a new business. I’m still exploring a variety of options, but a few things are bubbling to the top.

My previous company (Fotiva) was a venture-financed business, and as much fun as that was (and I mean that only partly facetiously) I’ve decided not to take that path this time. There’s several reasons:

• There’s a pretty narrow range of businesses that make sense for venture investors, and a much wider range of businesses for which there is an opportunity to make a contribution and build an excellent small enterprise. I don’t need to build a $100 million operation.

• I want to be able to focus my energy on building a product and a business, not on raising money.

• I want to be able to make my own decisions, and to have the flexibility to let the business evolve over time without the pressure of commitments to investors.

So I’m going to take the self-financed path for a while, which largely means working without pay and partnering with a few other folks who are willing to do the same in return for equity. The capital needed to start a new web business today, other than salaries, is amazingly small. Once we have a product and customers, we’ll consider outside investment if it seems a worthwhile tradeoff to enable faster growth.

It’s a big risk in some ways, and there are days when it seems a little crazy. But this is my third time around, and somehow it has always worked out in the past. The opportunities have never been greater.

So now that I’m on my way out of Adobe, what’s next?

I’m not sure yet. I’m interested in building a bootstrapped (vs. venture financed) small business in the web applications space. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to serve niche markets with focused solutions. I love the idea of a very small company being able to deploy hosted applications that make a real difference to its customers. It’s amazing what you can accomplish today with a few people and a great framework like Ruby on Rails.

Watch this space for updates as my plans solidify.