One of my favorite small business books is The E-Myth Revisited. It’s a small book, but pretty heady and introduces some great ideas. One of my favorite ideas is that you should build a business like you were going to sell it as a franchise. Even if yre not going to, it makes you think about efficiency, the re-usability of any moving part, and to look at the whole thing without you being present.
I realized this week that we can apply the same principle to building web apps. For a while now, as I build sites, I look at any functionality as a potential library or separate web site. This is 37Signal‘s Sell your By-product idea, but taken one step further and think of each idea as a business idea.
This makes me write cleaner code, do things the right way, take time to abstract things out, and comment better. All this with the idea of making the best possible product (both for the customer, and for the business owner), and that other people will be seeing and working with my code, probably without me being there to explain it.
Tags: 37 signals, E-Myth, franchising, Michael Gerber, signal to noise, svn, ways to think
