As mentioned in my previous post, I’m starting a new business, but I didn’t say much more. I can say more now.
It’s a software business, i.e. it develops and markets software. It might also do related things, but software will be at the core of it. I believe software is a good business, and a good business for me to do.
Software is a good business because it has great “unit economics”: once the software exists, the cost of making and delivering a new unit to a customer can be much less than the price paid by the customer, so the profit per unit can be quite high. Software also scales better. For example, to double the size of a consulting company, you probably need to double the number of employees, roughly speaking, but to double the size of a software company, you might only have to increase the number of employees by a small amount (for things like customer service).
Software is also a good business for my interests and my skills. I’ve been developing software since I was quite young. (It was called “programming computers” back then.) Software has been an important part of everything I’ve done in my career. Modern physics, applied mathematics and aerospace engineering all use software quite heavily, and developing software was a big part of my PhD research. I also created a lot of specialized software when I was involved with Second Life.
I’ll write more about the business structure and what the software does in future posts.
P.S. The photo at the top isn’t a photo of me. It’s a photo taken by Alejandro Escamilla and I got it from Unsplash.
Troy McConaghy 