Build your business like a puzzle

The amazing things about puzzle's is that you can start at any age. Depending on the complexity of the puzzle and your past experience with them, you may or may not see the whole picture after just a few pieces. In very large puzzle's it may be impossible to know how the different pieces may fit together to for a whole picture - or even form enough of part of the picture to know what that part is. This is even trickier if you are an individual or very small team.

Consider this when building your software. You will likely build many pieces or components for your solution and in many situations many of those components can be reused. Always consider that as a whole your solution may not be quite the picture you expected, but individually you may have formed some excellent component pieces.

Perhaps one of those parts is what the industry is looking for. So rather than building a whole CMS solution, consider that it is composed of an editor, a version manager, an RSS aggregator, a novel UI and so on - individually those parts compose some of the largest software companies on the web (writely, bloglines etc).

So, multiply your chances by building your pieces so that they can stand alone and perform a well-defined function which may well be the one that is grown and becomes your idea!