We’ve been working for one month now, and quite a lot of things happened already.

Since the announcement of the acquisition of ScrewTurn Wiki, two weeks ago, we received a few requests for commercial licenses, which is great. We’re a bit overwhelmed with sales-related work, but it’s a nice problem to have. I don’t expect this to continue over time, I believe it’s a one-time spike in sales due to the announcement. At any rate it’s generating an unexpected revenue that will surely be useful.

In the meantime, we’ve been accepted in the Microsoft BizSpark program. If you’re working in a startup and need Microsoft software, that’s the way to go. You will also get some visibility. Well, sort of, as there are thousands of startups already enlisted, so it feels a bit crowded. If you want to stand out, you have to build quality software that solves people’s problems and market it well: there’s no shortcut.

Joining BizSpark is quite easy, I would say a no-brainer. Unless you try to access the program via the wrong partner. All the three of us have graduated in the same university. This same university drives a startup incubator, which shall remain nameless, registered as a BizSpark Network Partner, so I thought it would have been easy to join the program as former students and founders of a software startup. I hate saying or writing bad things about people I don’t know, but I would say that the guys running the incubator are incompetent or, worse, they do not care about what they do. Basically, there has been no way to contact them. They do not answer emails. They do not even answer the phone. I was sure to incur in some kind of inefficiency or delay when dealing with them, but reality has gone way beyond my worst expectations. We have no time to waste, so off to plan B. There are a lot of widely-known companies that happen to be BizSpark Network Partners. Just to name a couple, there are Rackspace UK and GoGrid/ServePath. I submitted a request to the latter and in less than 24 hours we were set up and ready to go. Now that’s the way to go.

Besides handling this kind of havoc generated by bureaucrats, banks, accountants et al., we also did a lot of work. I don’t want to reveal an detail yet, but we’ll soon be announcing a private beta of a new product, so stay tuned.

I have to confess that I’m not very tired. I fear it’s because I don’t work enough, but after all I’m writing this at 7am. Or maybe I’m not tired because it’s just the first month. At any rate, we’ve logged roughly 300 hours of real work in the last three weeks. It’s a good number, considering the outrageous amount of time we wasted spent running around the city for setting things up.

And now, off to month #2.

You are now reading the first post of the Threeplicate Blog. We’re three Italian guys that just founded a software startup.

Bootstrapping a startup is usually a difficult and time-consuming task, and our case is no different. Even if I have worked for some time as a freelancer, there are quite a lot of things that are different from what I knew, or that simply go plain wrong. Anyway, we’re (almost) up-to-speed now, and that’s very nice.

So, how does it feel to work for my own company? It feels good. It’s not about not having a boss, mind you, it’s about working on things you really care about. It might seem a childish feeling, but for me it’s exactly like that for now. Even if we’ve been able to do only a limited amount of real work so far, it’s been great. I enjoyed every single minute of it. In the past, I’ve enjoyed what I did, sometimes I really loved it, but it’s a totally different matter now. Even stuff like, uhm, understanding why and how we have to pay a tax of €1,81 for every VAT-exempt invoice we issue, becomes funny (well, not funny, just a bit less boring).

It turns out paperwork is still paperwork. In two weeks, I think I have written my signature something like 19 million times. For the bank. For the company registry. For officially founding the company. On invoices. On contracts. But that’s fine, really, it all makes sense if you look at the big picture.

You’re surely wondering what we do. Firstly, we’ve acquired ScrewTurn Wiki and we’ll continue to improve and develop it, still free and open-source. If you’re reading this, you probably already knew about that (here is the official press release, in case you need it).

We’re also working on two more products behind the scenes, and we’ll release more details at the right time. You only need to know that we believe they have a lot of potential. On a side note, we were supposed to only develop one product right from the start, but plans tend to change along the way and thanks to some positive feedback we received on some early-stage prototype, we’ve got another software product in the workings.

Wait, but what is this blog about after all?

I can tell you what this blog is not about. There are hundreds of excellent technical blogs out there, so I don’t feel like writing another one, moreover we have this other blog which better suits technical topics, even if focused on a single product.

This blog and twitter will keep you updated on what we’re doing, what are our plans and how we manage, if we manage, to survive as a micro-ISV. We’re two weeks old, and we’ve got lots and lots of work to do. I think it’s a great challenge that deserves to be written down, and if you decide to follow us that’s even better.

Wish us luck, here we start our new journey.