i’m not above profiling the mistakes i make as i bring my new business to its feet. It’s possible some of you are budding entrepreneurs planning to follow the same path. So here’s my hot entrepreneurial tip of the day: DO YOUR RESEARCH.

Two months ago, i hunkered down to learn Actionscript 3, and i needed a project to practice on. i chose Sheet Happens!, a hobbyist sheet music app that allows you to transpose the chords in a Notepad-like environment. A good long while into production, i thought “Hey … i wonder if there’s anything like this on the market?”

As it turns out, there is one teensy tiny product out there called iChords. It doesn’t do exactly the same thing as Sheet Happens!. You can actually feed it an MP3, and iChords will dynamically “listen” to the song and display the chords as the song plays.

If Sheet Happens! is a car, iChords is a spaceship that transforms into a robot that eats cars for a mid-day snack.

To add insult to injury, iChords ships with D’Accord Chords Notepad, which looks exactly like Windows Notepad, with two extra menu additions: Transpose Up, and Transpose Down. That’s right - not only does iChords have a far better feature set than Sheet Happens!, it actually replicates the entire Sheet Happens! feature set as a footnote.

Sheet Happens! was also an excuse to launch an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) app, which integrates Flash with the user’s desktop. This brings up a second, equally excellent tip for small business owners: start with what you know. Untold Entertainment Inc.’s bread and butter is making Flash games, deployed to the browser. i haven’t heard a lot of demand for AIR apps, but i thought we could be on the bleeding edge. The trouble with that is after two months, Untold Entertainment’s games library stays the same size, and we have this music software anomaly that probably won’t interest our core clients.

All told, developing Sheet Happens! wasn’t a complete waste of time. i have a much better handle on AS3 now, and will be periodically posting SNAFUs and programming tricks to help anyone else transitioning from AS2 to AS3.

i recently had to step back into old Actionscript 2 code, and it was like sliding my foot into a well-worn, mildewy sports sock where the sweat dried and mummified the sock into the shape of my foot. i was amazed at how quickly and easily i could program in AS2. i almost closed my eyes as i typed, and the code just flowed out of me. Contrast that with AS3, where i have to pay careful consideration to each line, and every time i compile i get a truckload of errors.

i worry that delving into my old code will undo all of the AS3 training i’ve done. i need to limit my exposure, like an 8-year old sneaking tiny glimpses at the sun, wondering how long it’ll be before he goes blind.

iChords can be purchased for an amazingly low price at finer download sites everywhere. Sheet Happens! can not.