As I said in the previous post I’m going to release the first product of my mISV in October 1st, 2008. After evaluating lots of ideas I decided to build an “email extractor” or “email spider”. The more general idea is to extract useful data from different sources. This can be:

• Extract email addresses from web.
• Extract email addresses from local documents.
• Extract email addresses from outlook files.
• Extract phone/fax numbers from web.
• etc, etc

This can get pretty complicated and will require a lot of efforts, so for the first version I’ll focus on extracting email addresses from the web. But why this product? The two most important reasons are:

• I have already built a simple version in a few days and I know that it’s possible to built it in the timeframe I have planned.
• There’s definitely a market for it. There are at least 5-6 competitors in the same niche and based on their site activity they seem to be doing well.

But what I will do differently to differentiate from the competition? What I will do better? Why will people buy my product? Well, to tell the truth I have no idea (yet). I think it’s almost impossible to answer these questions before building the product. You have to start working, have some users, get some feedback, improve the product and repeat the cycle. If you improve continuously, you’ll be successful. The key to succeed is not to have a killer idea (at least for 99.99% of us), but is to listen to customers and improve all the time. As said by one of the blogers I read frequently (http://www.followsteph.com/2008/06/26/the-secret-to-success-can-be-summed-up-in-one-word-perseverance/) the key is preservance. To be successful the product may end up very different to how I’m envisioning now, but we’ll know this after some time (I hope not too much time:)).