Ask HN: Single Technical Founder with No Business Experience Seeks Advice

1 points by boxerab 11y ago ↗ HN

Long time lurker on HN, now I need some advice on a project of mine: I have been working for the last year on bootstrapping a GPU-accelerated jpeg 2000 codec. I have passed most of the technical hurdles, and should have a working, very fast compressor by the end of the summer. I am now interested commercializing this project, but I am not sure how to go about doing that. For example, I need to work out the business model: The only other company I know of that is doing this kind of thing has a business to business model that licenses its SDK to other companies that then integrate into their products. Alternatively, I could sell directly to the consumer. Another question: How to turn a side project supported by a regular paycheck into a a full time venture?

Any type of guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated! I am located in Canada, by the way.

Thanks!!!

2 comments

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callmeed 11y ago ↗

First, did you build this project to solve a personal pain point OR was it just a fun technical challenge? If the former, great, continue on. If the latter, your first order of business is to find out if this solves a pain point for anyone. If it doesn't, you don't have a business.

Next, start getting in front of people you think might be customers, talking to them, showing them a demo, and showing them where they'd save time and/or money.

Having working in the photography space, my hunch is that you're unlikely to have success selling this to consumers or even smaller companies (I could be wrong and not understand your product).

Two other things to chew on:

This might be a project you open-source and then provide a "premium" level on top of (premium support or help with installation).

I know HN is generally against software patents, but this might be a situation where you could get a patent and that could help you license the technology. IANAL and JPEG has/had its own patents but it might be worth investigating.

boxerab 11y ago ↗

Thanks, callmeed. I built this mostly as a technical challenge. But, I have studied the market and jpeg 2000 encoding and decoding speed is definitely a pain point in a number of areas: in particular digital cinema post-production and broadcasting. Regarding open source, I initially planned to open source this, but after spending such an enormous amount of time and energy, with nobody in the community interested in helping, I changed my plan to closed source. As for patents, as you probably know image compression is one of the most encumbered areas of software dev. I am very much opposed to patents, so I wouldn't be interested in getting any.