Microsft BizSpark
So, like I wrote yesterday, we have been struggling as software engineers on how to market our new start up. We think we have a nice and very useable product but how on earth do we show it to the people who would use it?
There are a lot of different avenues to take and one avenue approached me via email this morning.
The email I received was from Adam at Mashable.com (I emailed them yesterday seeing if they would be interested in profiling us) giving me a link to submit NestWell.com to the Microsoft BizSpark program.
Microsoft BizSpark is a unique program for start-ups like ours to join, get mentorship, support, visibility, and have full use of the Microsoft development suite for free for three years.
What’s in it for Microsoft you ask? Well my guess is the answer is in the software. Getting Microsofts development stack for free would enable you to build your application completely on Microsoft Server 8 running IIS with .NET/Silverlight/Whateverelse as the cherry on top. After three years start-ups in the program will have to start paying for those products and that gets pricey.
NestWell.com is running on a Linux server, running Apache, built with PHP (using the Cake framework if you care) with other automated python processes running via CRON.
And that my friends is a completely different paradigm.
I would really like to sign up for the program but I am going to need to think about it a little more. The companies involved with BizSpark are great and I respect Microsoft but unfortunately we don’t use their development tools and have no intention to in the future.
After reading through the user agreement there is no requirement as far as I can tell to completely use Microsoft products but since we don’t use one (nothing, not even IE other than testing) I’m not sure where that leaves us.
I am going to have to chew on this tonight and think it over. Great program for sure…but are we a fit? I don’t know.
If anyone with personal experience with BizSpark has advice I would love to hear it! Drop me a line at “info [at] nestwell [dot] [com]”.
