It’s exactly one year since my first Cornerstone Technology blog post, where I promised myself that this time, it would be different. Looking back, it seems I wasn’t wrong, although I’m not sure it’s been different in all the right ways…

Firstly, an apology. In my first post, I promised that “over the coming weeks and months, I plan to write regularly about the development of the business”. Underestimating my forthcoming workload, and the challenge of setting aside time to write something worth reading, I would have probably been better off promising to write irregularly. Including this post, I managed to publish 15 articles this year, with the following distribution:

(Upon reflection, I probably set the bar too high aiming to publish every week, although it’s a good discipline if you can manage it.)

Of course, Real Artists Ship

The above sorry-looking chart is only part of the story though. This morning whilst taking a quick skim across the 1715 unread articles (!) in my RSS reader, I was struck by Seth Godin’s end of year challenge:

What did you ship in 2010?

After a little analysis, this turned out to be more positive experience than I first anticipated; not quite Seth’s catalogue of successes, but a reasonable set of achievements nonetheless:

• Published my first article on Wikipedia, on FIXatdl naturally
• Launched the FIXatdl Jump-Start service and signed the first customer
• Delivered the FIXatdl for European, North American and Asian algorithms for a major broker
• Developed and published Atdl4net, the first open source implementation of FIXatdl on .NET (although it has a lot of rough edges, it is nevertheless a very useful reference implementation)
• Launched AtdlTools.com, home to a free FIXatdl validation service that leverages Atdl4net

So the final picture doesn’t look quite so bad, after all:

This time, it is Different

As I mentioned above, second time around, I wanted to learn from the mistakes made in my first venture. In a few ways, I think I have:

• Staffing – at my first firm, we added staff approximately at the same rate we generated new revenue. In theory, this gives you more capacity to build product, but in practice it often means you build stuff nobody wants, just because you can. At present, Cornerstone Technology is still just me, and I’m inclined to follow the example of Peldi Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq, whose approach was “wait until you are about to die” before hiring someone. (There’s a lot more great insights from his talk at Business of Software 2010 (BoS2010) in this excellent write-up);
• Doing things properly – as mentioned in my earlier post, being properly organised for developing software is critical. Things are much easier and cheaper these days – programmes like Microsoft’s BizSpark means the entry-level costs are minimal, and there is so much available on the web, either free or reasonably low-priced. Despite being an organisation of one, most of the key tools and disciplines are already in place ready for product development;
• Focus – although I can’t say everything I’ve done this year has been focused on my chosen area of FIXatdl, I have managed to keep it as my primary business focus, and I am clear where the long-term business growth is coming from;
• Not building stuff that nobody wants – this was endemic in the first few years of my first business, but as there’s only me in the new business, I’ve been forced to be much more thorough in terms of what to build. I’ve also had the advantage of getting a lot of insight into what a prospective customer might need through the Jump-Start service.

What’s Next?

Since becoming involved in the algorithmic trading space, and in particular with FIXatdl, I’ve believed there was a product opportunity out there somewhere. I just wasn’t clear exactly what it was. The problem with this predicament is that you risk running out of capital while you’re still working things out in your mind.

Thankfully, at BoS2010, a fellow entrepreneur, Chris Parsons (founder of Knowledge Architecture, a successful San Francisco-based solution provider for architect firms), helped me see that I needed more time to get a clearer idea of what to build. Following on from that insight, I’ve subsequently taken on a part-time consulting engagement at my old firm, which runs for the next six months or so. It’s not specifically in the algorithmic trading space (although it is to do with the FIX protocol), but it does mean that I don’t have to worry about putting food on the table. (My wife had previously threatened me that if the business wasn’t generating decent revenue by year end, then she expected me to go out and get a proper job – perish the thought!)

So the next step in the limited time I have left to myself is to define and build some sort of minimum viable product. I hope to have more to report in time for the FIX Protocol EMEA Conference on 1 March. To avoid any disappointment, I won’t promise to write before then!

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