We were lucky to get some advice from a great marketer.  His name was Gary Rosensteel.  He runs a website that helps offers start up advisory services for new companies at http://www.nucopro.com/ and an comprehensive entrepreneurial support web portal at http://helpstartups.com/. 

We were very appreciative to receive an hour of his time.  He helped us look at were we are and were we need to be.  We are going to correct course for the company and narrow our focus.  After speaking with Gary, we realized our current scope was still too broad.  He also mentioned finding a niche market and working towards excelling in it.  I am not sure what markets would the best to focus on right now with the way IT is changing.  I really want to help people develop good software and learn the new technologies, but the training market is over saturated in certain areas.  It was brought to our attention that when times are tight, this is the first part of the budget to get cut.  We have decided to move forward with three objectives: 

1.  Individual Developer Training Packages 

These will be focused on individual developers needs and will be priced so individual developers can purchase them. If their companies are willing, maybe they can be reimbursed.  I really hope to find a niche market here, and I don’t know of any other companies with these offerings.  This is going to have the least amount of focus, and we will be testing the space with our product offering.  We hope to have our first packet out within the next month.

2.  Kids Programming Course 

This is another one I think will be a lot of fun and maybe moved out a bit on the time line.  I am going to start look into setting up a package.

3.  Custom Software Development 

We have always been interested in custom software development and will continue to pursue this as the main source of income for Coden Enterprises.

 

I am still dedicated to pulling my TDD knowledge to the next level.  I have finished the book “Test Driven Development by Example” by Kent Beck. I will be continuing to focus on TDD as much as possible.  I am going to move Refactoring, Silverlight, JQuery, Powershell, and Sql Server 2008 way up the list for studying in attempt to adjust my focus.  

Code Happy,

Bill