IT commercialisation hints

You’ve given me quite a bit of information already and I’ll take it that all of it is “stable state”, ie cast in concrete and not likely to change. If and when it does change then what is said below will need adaptation.

I’ll focus on issues. There are already some obvious strengths in the situation, eg your experience and career in the live events sector and the apparent fact that the program saves time (hence money).

QUESTIONS

The world is awash with software, so you have to be good to get noticed, let alone make any money from it.

As your hope is to sell out to others fairly early, the first thing to do is to get clarity as to such things as:

• who are the prospective trade sale buyers of your computer program?
• What might they want to buy – software, support materials, website, something else also?
• what do the buyers have that our software can integrate with?
• what might our software go on to become for them (eg part of a suite of programs or added functionality for an existing program they have)?
• what alternative programs are there to yours, identify their strengths and weaknesses?
• what is the direction of the relevant software technology field? Here it is useful to think ahead about what the functionality to build into versions 2.0 and 3.0 of your program.

Getting early customer adopters is often critical, especially for a micro business or start-up like yours. So where is the software already being used. How can we get other users, even if it be on a concessional financial basis?

Following on from that last question, there is a practical issue of how people might buy, ie queries about their buying pattern:

• who will buy (a contractor, a live events equipment supplies company, an events venue, someone else)?
• what level of expertise is needed to “bolt” your software onto whatever that buyer needs to go with to work and achieve a beneficial and practical result?
• is there a blog, wiki, software manual or support material, testimonials, success stories, forum or other mechanism in place to help end users and convince buyers that “it’s all real, go ahead buy now!”?
• how and where would people come across the software (affiliate marketing, advertising, word of mouth, riding off the back of another program)?

As regards intellectual property, contracts and business structuring:

• you need an available software name, maybe it should be a registered trade mark; I note you are using [name deleted]. I’d have to do a proper trade mark and general name availability search and do not know if that has been done by you professionally as yet;
• I see you have [domain name deleted] as a domain name; perhaps you should lock in other domain spaces;
• for marketing, it would be good to have the website professionally designed; it’s currently very geeky;
• if the software can be downloaded off the web, then you should have a written licence and/or terms of use drafted;
• you need appropriate business structuring – I note from your website that “[name deleted”] is set out as the copyright holder; and
• as to whether a patent is available, or useful, or even financially feasible at this stage, I don’t know unless we obtain search results and conduct more analysis.

ATTACHMENT

For my attached lengthy invention commercialisation questionnaire, you can fill it in and email it back to me for further feedback. There are many further questions and a process of due diligence to go through, but we can leave both till later.

NEXT STEP

You suggested a face to face chat. That would be fine. However in these situations I always prefer to read text first. Give me good text! If you do that then in response, depending on what is indicated in the details, I might efficiently make a costed proposal for the way forward. I look forward to your response.

Regards

Noric Dilanchian