Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Looking Back 2: Planning my second voyage

My initial voyage suffered a prematured failure at around Dec 2003. KY was posted overseas but I still maintained contact with him via email. I tried to bring out the topic of continuing our business venture but he seemed totally uninterested. So I started to desperately actively look for another business partner.

During the first half year of 2004, I was promoted to senior engineer and tasked to lead a new project. The new role and responsibilities somehow kept me busy enough to stop thinking about any business venture. Then came July, I had a chat with my colleague K from customer service department. Apparently, he was quite unhappy with the increments these few years and was looking for other opportunities. Quite obviously, our topic started to shift towards the possibilities of having a business venture together. We had a few talks after that, and eventually we decided to create a product and setup a company together.

This time round, I was quite confident of the product we had thought of. There wasn’t many similar products in the market and most of them had serious flaws. The possible market segments were rather untapped at that moment. So I started writing the requirements specification and software design, while K took care of the administrative stuffs like name cards, letter-heads, company stamps, brochures and packaging.

My target was to finish the development and release the first version by January 2005, and then quit my job to concentrate full-time on my own company. I would have 2 months notice period to fully hand-over my job, so the earliest I can leave would be around end of March 2005. I was very determined about this venture as I knew I wasn’t getting any younger and there wasn’t many chances I can afford to slip by.

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