Reality

The meeting went very well indeed, but then again I've said that before. The reason to believe that it might be different this time, that something might genuinely come of the expressions of interest, is that Hobbyist (our new partner) stands to earn a buttload of money from the project; our previous would-be partners wished to make existing customers happy, which is a pretty weak motivation given that they are already customers and not visibly unhappy.

The two Hobbyists we met (not the boss, of course) were delighted by the database and very excited about the project. As so often happens, we all had very different ideas of what we wanted to achieve and how it should look. There will probably be six to nine months of work, not just two. I had been worried about the timeframe, that waiting six to nine months might put them off, but that too was just right in their books: they immediately said "Oh, just in time for the 2006 winter catalogue."

Mister Hobbyist is an intuitive boss, he gets gut feelings about what will be hot in two years' time and goes charging off into obvious dead-ends which turn out to be multilane highways; and although he has never actually used a computer himself, he has a gut feeling that this software will be hot. I can handle that. Nobody mentioned actual figures, but both Hobbyists think that there might well be thousands of sales.

Watch this space. (But first, a short and very well deserved holiday.)