After reading a post by Giles, I’ve decided that my primary goal for 2010 will be to build 12 new micro-businesses this year. You might think I’m crazy, since building even one business in a year is difficult but hear me out.

I’m not talking about building 12 Little Stream Softwares (yet). I’m taking about taking an idea, building systems around it, and launching it. These are businesses that will take from a couple of weeks to a few months to build and launch.

I’m not looking to score 12 home runs here. These aren’t Twitter or Facebook sized businesses, or anything a VC would be interested in. What I’m looking for are small, simple, and sustainable businesses where I can get experience creating and providing value for a larger group of people. There’s a saying:

The fastest way to get what you want from life is to give away more value to more people than you are now.

I already have 27 ideas written down (and 3 more from last night) so it’s just a matter to implementing them. A few ideas are extensions to my services at Little Stream Software and a few are completely new products. I’ll be posting more about each idea as I work on them but a few ideas I have are:

• Redmine hosting (Contact me if you’re interested in this, I’m start to build a pre-launch list)
• Ebooks to help freelance developers get the projects they want to be working on
• Micro-Applications that solve a single problem that no one else is solving

2010 is going to be my year of growth, either growing to some exciting new markets or getting a lot of experience with failure. Either way, growth is good.

Eric Davis