Montreal Tech Watch

LavaBlast, which was started one year ago, markets a series of tools for franchise owners, letting them to centralize operations with franchisees, taking care of sales, accounting and stock management.

The “microISV”, as the founders like to call it, follows Joel Spolsky’s philosophy, which is 1 - build a profitable company from day 1, and 2 - eat your own dog food. They also chose from the company’s beginnings not to seek any VC or angel funding.

Jason Kealey and Etienne Tremblay, the two founders who come from the software engineering program from University of Ottawa, knew that they just had to start a company dedicated on making great software. One year after the launch, it seems their business is doing great, and they are now giving back advice to anyone wanting to start a software company (part 1 - part 2 - part 3)

If you have some time today, read those posts. Some interesting excerpts:

…[the long tail] if you build and promote something worth buying, they will buy it.

The most important part of the company is not the idea but the people. A small and closely knit team of people who’ve worked together in the past is a recipe for success, regardless of the idea.

If you’re not happy in your own company, doing what you want to do, you have a problem.

because we’re self-funded, I feel we have a competitive advantage over our VC-funded competition. Our competitors want to skip the flat part of the growth phase and jump directly into the areas of highest ROI. Generally, this means developing one-size fits all software with (if you’re lucky) tons of configuration option

technology doesn’t solve conflicts

Business Plan: Before launching our company, we worked on a short business case and participated in a Technology Venture Challenge. We didn’t win, but it was a very beneficial experience because sitting down and thinking about what the hell you’re trying to accomplish is a very rewarding process.

They also explain in detail what tools they use internally to get the job done (Skype, SupportBlast, Microsoft Groove, Twiki, Lotus Unyte, MS Sharedview). They also advise Station C for any future web entrepreneur :-)

I like to see once in a while a web company that does things differently. They didn’t take any outside funding, they didn’t spend any time on financial projections or market studies, they didn’t chose the fashionable technology of the day (LavaBlast use .NET instead of your typical Ruby on Rails or Python framework), they didn’t spend time coming to our hyped camps, breakfasts and conferences, and actually shipped a product (and got solid revenues) within a year…

Maybe there is a lesson to be taken here.