Are you starting up a Micro ISV? If you are you might not even of heard of the term before. A Micro ISV is basically a small one man business that develops and sells software.
Many of the shareware products on the web are actually produced by Micro ISV (guys like you and me).

When you start up you might just focus on producing the software itself. This is fun and can sometimes go fast, but as you will notice, programming the software is far from all the work. There are a lot of other aspects that you might find more or less inspiring along the way. This also means that there are a lot of places to put your money along the way. You need to keep it simple and keep it cheap.

When developing software you can pay for your development environment, you can pay for graphics, database, installation building software, GUI tools, license managing software and much more.

Keep it clean, simple and cheap or you will never make it to the end. When developing History Explorer I had decided to keep my expenses close to zero. But I did choose to pay for some services as I will let you know about in later posts.

If you expect to earn some cash on the software you produce, you will still want to hold on to your cash, It might well take some time before you see any cash rolling. The most important thing to avoid are the reoccuring costs. So avoid any monthly or annual licenses and find the low one time expences if you have to put in money. You might also need to market your product, spend some to get some, so save it for then.

It is quite thrilling to see how you can proceed step by step with out actually spending a lot of cash. Here is one example, I have worked at several companies that spent tons of cash on having an external part come in and design a logo for the company. Now your logo is important, but you can get good results for free.

If you have some graphical skills you can sit down with Word or with Paint.net and design a logo. If your skills are limited keep it simple and clean. When you are done ask a couple of honest friends what they think, since you most often can’t rely on your own judgement.
And if you feel that you can’t make it ask a friend to help you out, and if all else fails you are going to have to outsource it, but ther are designers out there who do a good and cheap job.

Good luck,
Peter