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How to Derive Revenue Streams for a Business
Would I survive the first year of business? Would I get adequate funding from third parties? Would I need to burn through my own savings? Will I be able to pay the rent? Turns out: Yes! How did I get there? What financial decisions did I make? I will explain the above chart in this article… Decisions As entrepreneurs, we make an incredible amount of decisions on a large array of topics. One of the most important topics in a young business is the financial topic, which is closely related to the growth topic. The following TL;DR will summarise these particular decisions: Does my business want to grow fast? I…
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The Many Hats I’m Wearing as a Founder
The roles people have in companies are not secrets to anyone. Nor are they surprises. Yet, when creating a company, they’re easy to overlook, with devastating business implications. When starting a company, you will have to do things you never did before. Things you don’t know how to do. Things you don’t like doing. Things you didn’t know needed doing. Things you thought didn’t need doing anyway, and which you may have been cynical about. I most certainly have been. This gets “worse”, or let’s say more challenging and interesting, when you’re alone in the company. Wearing hats I like the metaphor of wearing hats. Because that’s what I’m doing…
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Making Money When all the Industry Wants is Free Beer
I was terrified. After 5 years of doing jOOQ as an all Open Source project between 2008 – 2013, I suddenly switched to commercial licensing. Will I be ripped to pieces? Will the community hate me? Will there be an unfriendly fork? This blog post will show that my fears 5 years ago were completely unjustified. Not only that, I was silly to have never asked for money in the early days. What I did may not work for everyone. Yet, I’d like to share this part of the jOOQ story to help encourage any of you who are sitting on some (currently Open Source) golden product, which you want…
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Growth Is Not the Only Goal
For many, growth is the undisputed holy grail of business. The ultimate goal. Grow or die. Eat or be eaten. You can google it, you’ll find many answers: A lot of what’s written does make sense. Business and technology can be seen as products of an ongoing hyper evolution, an extension to Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution of biological life. I find this a very interesting thought. If you want to learn more, look at how Kevin Kelly from Wired defined our technology as the 7th Kingdom of Life, the Technium – an interesting talk and point of view I definitely recommend watching: This is an academic perspective. What does…
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The Business Behind 5 Years of Data Geekery and 10 Years of jOOQ
Almost 5 years ago, on August 15, 2013, Data Geekery was registered in the trade register of Zurich, Switzerland. What a great ride it has been since then. And what an exciting ride will come in the near future! You may or may not already know me as a person, the developer behind jOOQ, e.g. from conferences where I had a few talks. After 5 years, I still run this company alone, with no employees (although, I have plans to change that), and I’d like to share 1–2 insights into how that worked out, and why I made many of the decisions I did — including the occasional mistakes. Blogging For the occasion, I’ve decided to do something…