When I began this series, I started with the belief that most of my readers would already have their idea but that it just wouldn't be fleshed out. How wrong I was...

What's the best way to come up with an idea?

Personally, I think this is the wrong question. Having an idea in itself isn't worth much. Many of the greatest inventors, creators and pioneers in history aren't the ones who initially came up with the idea. They simply did it right. Therefore, I would first re-form the above question to this:

How do I find an idea I can be passionate about?

There, that's a bit better. Do you see the difference? The first was focused on just finding an idea... preferably one that makes money. The second is focused on finding an idea that will keep you up thinking in the middle of the night or will rattle your brain in the shower or put that little sparkle in your eyes that convinces your friends and family to not bring up the subject. Personally, I believe there are two main strategies for this process. Today, I'm covering the first.

I was sent a link this morning to a new site offering "next-generation online project management software". I was excited to see if it was something along the lines of Basecamp, dotProject, NetOffice, MS Project, or a variety of other things systems which I've seen and played with out there.

As part of my role in the community, I happily evaluate other projects to figure out what we're doing wrong or right and figure out what we can do better. There are some great products out there and there are some terrible products out there. My personal goal is to always work to move dotProject into the great category.

So I check out the site for "Enterprise Project 2.0" to play with their demo or to check out the screenshots.

Notice anything odd?

The color scheme is a little bland, the icons aren't the most descriptive, but generally the functionality and features look pretty extensive. Looks like it could be a great system...

I am not an attorney, so nothing here should be taken as legal advice. It should be considered in the way it's written... as past experiences and pitfalls.

That being said, the first thing you must do when you want to start a company is spend a bit of time reviewing the legal side of things. Every engineer and geek I've ever met - myself included - believes that this can all be done by reading the law and following it to its logical conclusion. Although this seems logical, you have to remember that the enforcement of the law is based on two primary aspects: What is written vs How its been interpreted. The first is easily determined and googled. The second requires a bit of experience and arcane understanding of how Case Law works.

Personally, there are four different factors which immediately come to mind and seem to resurface the most commonly:

Non-disclosure agreements
Non-compete agreements
Organization of your business
Terms and Licensing of your work

Now let's break them down one by one...

I've noticed an odd occurance lately. It seems that a few times each and every week, I get emails from friends, acquaintenances, family, and even random people asking for advice on their business, their business plans, or often just their ideas. The generous and friendly ones invite me out for drinks or to lunch, but I realize that most of what I've shared with them has revolved around a handful of points. To further clarify and expand upon them, I thought I'd share them here and offer them up to the community for criticism and comment.

Disclaimers:
* If I don't know you, thanks for the consideration, but I'm not going to review your business plan. I may not even respond to you via email. I'm not trying to be rude, I'm protecting my time just as you would protect yours.
* I am not an attorney, so nothing here should be taken as legal advice.
* By "geek", I mean "highly esteemed technologist without regard to color coordination abilities". I wouldn't want to tick off the higher geek echelons. ;)

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's cover the basics: Getting Started.

All I hear about all the time is how valuable testers are. At the Better Software Conference, everyone was thinking and talking about Testing. Whether it was Automated Unit Testing or Customer Acceptance Testing, everyone was thinking about Testing. Well, I completely disagree.

Testing is useless and there's nothing of value gained from it.

First of all, you've all hired the best and brightest developers there are in your field. Most companies talk about hiring the "Top 1%" but you really did it. Their code always turns out flawless the first time around, congrats.

The entire CaseySoftware site has recently undergone a rennovation. If you notice any oddities, bugs, or annoyances, please let me know. Yes, I am aware of the formatting oddities.

As you might have noticed this morning, the launch date was not met. Although this is never a good thing, I thought I would use it as our own retrospective.

Some pluses:

First, the overall site design was great. I'm very happy with the narrow(er) three column layout. The core of it came from Open Source Web Design. The designer has had it mostly complete and just waiting for this conversion since the end of May. Having everything with the same look and feel is already simplifying things.