Nick Boucart's blog

Inspired by the trend in many domains (e.g. CRM with players like Salesforce, productivity with Google Apps for Business or Microsoft 360, or project management and collaboration with Basecamp, Trello and many others), many software builders in Belgium are evaluating the opportunities Cloud and SaaS could bring for their own software offerings.

At Sirris, we provide a benchmarking service towards software product builders. One of the outcomes of that service is that your challenges as a software product builder are charted against the collective. In that way, you'll learn for example that you are not the only one struggling with test automation of quickly responding to changing market needs. In this article I'll introduce 5 high level challenges we have observed in our 8 years of working systematically with software builders.

Many Belgian SMEs join international R&D projects in ICT. Clusters like ITEA2, ARTEMIS or the FP7 program of the European Commission spawn numerous research projects. But how do these research projects come to be? The answer: brokerage events.

I recently read an article by Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals, about their rewrite of their successful SaaS product Basecamp. That got me thinking: both in my career as a software developer as well as during my many contacts with software builders as an adviser for Sirris, legacy is a theme that pops up often, in all sorts of forms and shapes.

So you have an idea for a cool new software product. You feel there might be a huge potential in it, you are enthusiastic, nay passionate about it. Great. What next steps are you going to take now?