BizTalk360 – crossing the Atlantic, off to Boston

I was planning to write this email for a very long time, a brief post about my personal experience building BizTalk360 from concept to product. We been doing lots of talks so far around London and various cities in Europe (London ,Sweden, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden Again). For the first time we are crossing the Atlantic, to Boston for the Business of Software conference. This time it’s not for presenting BizTalk360 and doing product promotion but to understand the business side of things running BizTalk360 efficiently. Last 20 months or so is an incredible journey for us. Coming from a pure technical background, there is a steep learning curve on making a concept into a marketable product. The technical part of the equation is only 25-30%, even in that 10% of so will be not be so fun part and not relevant to the actual business problem you are trying to solve. Examples: Working on Licensing, Obfuscation, Payment processing, Installer, Source control, branching, build process, code signing certificate, Web site etc. As a business owner  you are always occupied with one thing or the other. You’ll soon get accustomed to sleeping whenever there is a little time, doing different things based on your body condition (ex: do some trivial things at end of the long day like tuning the website) etc. I personally would like to thank my wife and children (4 years and 2 years) for their incredible support. I don’t think I’m matured enough to advise people, but based on my experience so far one piece of advice I can give is “Time is king, once you lose it you won’t get it back“, and its never too late. The best time to start something is “NOW” There is a famous saying “Ideas are worth nothing, it’s the action that makes the difference“, that action part is not so easy.  If you got something in your mind, action it. If I think back, the version of BizTalk360 I showed to Yossi and Michael just before Christmas 2010 and to the MVP community in Feb 2011 was a completely different product. The key is keep improving the product day by day. Our other key objective is “One step forward each day” Another important thing I have learned is invest your time in reading some of the great books. I’m not a great reader until I started BizTalk360 the only books I have read was technical books. In fact I had this notion of wasting time if I read a novel or something that’s not relevant to my technical stuff. But starting BizTalk360 changed the whole thing. These are some of the books I have read,  motivational, business related, time management, getting things done, etc      The above books are not the complete list, I was reading at an incredible phase of 2-3 books a month. You may be wondering where I got the time, it goes back to my point of “Time is King”, I  bought audio books wherever possible and used all my driving hours, and I also build up the habit  of picking 1 or 2 books during my flight and complete it. There are other numerous blogs, podcasts, videos I haven gone through during my journey. You really don’t need to go and invent new things all the time, it’s all about repetition, I picked up lot of those small practical things I can apply to my day to day activity which enhanced my productivity from the books. Another important thing while reading such books is, make note of actionable items. Otherwise you just read the book feel energetic and completely forget about it after a week or so. The peak of this journey is Business of Software conference here in Boston. I debated quite a bit whether to attend the conference, because it’s not cheap both financially and time wise. I did my research, gone through few past videos, blog post and the general positive feedback I’ve seen from the past attendees. There are still so much to learn and a long journey ahead, what better way to learn than the people who has already done it. I hope BOS will give us some of the skills we desperately need to run BizTalk360 successfully. For us there is no turning back now, we can only see forward. We are very positive, we’ll make BizTalk360 successful.