my lover's charms are in a box beneath my bed

the catch-22 situation, the ones that i've been explaining over and over but no one seems to grasp.

• a simple mission: develop a marketable product that fills a niche, and sell it. make money. sell-out. retire early.


• the problem: you don't believe in venture capitalists, you've almost depleted your war chest. the few things you have: your guts, ideas, the believe in your product.


• the catch-22 shituation: you don't have the money to build it. even if you do, it means that you're not gonna be able to pay for your own salary.


• so, you're back to doing small projects here and there (see cash flow below), and that child of yours, that dream, that believe, that goddamn product never materialized. and you know that the vendors are going to implement the same shit sooner or later.


• what if you just spend the remaining of your war chest on development? right, but how long can you sustain without venture fundings until your first sale? along the line, you need to drop/halt development to do other projects in order to sustain, which is as good as not doing any development work at all.

this is what been playing in my head every f*cking morning when i get up, and every night when i sleep (that and my miserly life, or course).

another thing that people seems to misunderstood is the cash flow problem, or rather, the illlogics of cash flow. i'm not gonna dwell on this but suffice to say that the amount of projects you do is not directly proportional to the amount of money you earn. in addition, the number of months in a year is not directly proportional to the number of projects you get. not all things add up.

there's an uglier head as well - starting an IT business in malaysia is hard.

after a couple of years and a few setbacks, i think what i've written above is pretty much true (unless you're born with silver spoons or your dad's name starts with a tan sri or it's on the net so it must be true) because as far as i'm concerned, i am smarter than a monkey.

listening to: tori amos - crucify