Project IdealismI've had a number of conversations lately with people who are building web products to either support an existing business, or to start a new business entirely. These conversations take place with existing clients, prospective clients, friends and family members.
We make software, so we have these conversations frequently. But it seems now more than ever everyone has an idea for an app.
One theme that keeps coming up is that people will often compare a software project to some sort of other 'real world' project that they can relate to. This makes sense, because by relating their idea to something they have experience with it helps them to understand the process of building something.
Indeed, we'll often use brick and mortar analogies saying something like "we'll definitely want to clean that up later, but you don't start hanging the paintings before you put up the drywall" if we're explaining why it's not quite time to work on a new icon.
But there are very real and important ways to understand how 'software is not bricks'. If you're thinking of building an application of any kind, I think these are some good things to keep in mind.
Most People have a frame of reference for the cost of bricks, but not for software
Just about everyone pays a monthly rent or mortgage on a home. We also tend to have a general understanding that the city in which you live has an impact on your home. We know that a home in San Francisco is more expensive than Iowa or Nebraska. Because of this, we have a built in frame of reference for how much things cost.
The exact opposite is true with software.
Most people interact only with software that has had tens of millions of dollars worth of design and development effort put into it, and most people have never used the first version of a beta product. Their frame of reference for how software should work are Facebook, Twitter, Square, iOS, and maybe something like Salesforce and some productivity suite from Microsoft.
The kicker is that just about no one goes to Facebook and thinks to themselves, 'wow this is some nice software, I bet it cost a fortune to make.' But if you walked into a 4 bedroom single family house in San Francisco that looked over the golden gate bridge you would know it took some real money to purchase.
The industry helps perpetuate this with stories of 'kids in hoodies' hacking all night and then selling it for a couple million dollars. The difficult work that comes for years after is treated like a footnote.
Value is based primarily on the number of people that use your product
If you spend a million dollars building an office complex and you don't rent it out to anyone, it still has some intrinsic value. It's highly unlikely that the value of the building will reach zero. Likewise, putting 100 people in a small apartment will do nothing to improve the value of the apartment.
Again, software is the opposite.
You could spend a million dollars having the best development team in the world writing the cleanest code with the perfect design that you imagined. But if no one is using it, or if it's not solving a real problem or providing real entertainment value, then it really doesn't matter how much time or money you spent building the software. A million dollar investment in software could in fact be worth close to nothing.
Of course there's an opportunity here which is that if you can work like crazy to solve real problems and get users, the simple fact that you have customers can help you overcome a lot of other issues, even if your product isn't as robust as you want it to be.
Limitations on software are less obvious
If you were building a house and suddenly decided it might be sweet to have a swimming pool on the roof, you have a built in understanding that this change would require significant effort to accomplish. With software, the limitations are so much less obvious that you have to constrain yourself because you can do just about anything.
It's possible to do so much, that you can actually do too much.
Software is not bricks
It's not a good or a bad thing that software is not bricks. But if you're thinking of starting a project make sure you're aware that both the risks and rewards are inherently different from those in the physical world, and this reality can work with you or against you.
Build wisely.