5 ms·

This is a great article, but it would be much better if they highlighted products that were either: a) Not super-duper niche, or b) Somewhat interesting In my

by jlgosse 16y ago

This is a great article, but it would be much better if they highlighted products that were either: a) Not super-duper niche, or b) Somewhat interesting In my opinion, a large percentage of these products were missing legs before the developers even started. Be it the idea was ridiculously boring, or it had zero opportunity to make any significant revenue. I'd prefer to see failed software products which definitely should have taken off, but didn't due to reason X or reason Y. For example, Company A didn't look for funding for reason X, but then their burn rate got the best of them and the company failed. Or, Amazing Product B was growing really fast, but didn't learn to scale properly in time, so they lost 90% of their customer base when all of their servers crashed for two weeks. Stories like that would be MUCH more memorable than a guy who failed to turn a profit from chimney sweep software.

kenjackson 16y ago
I really liked hearing about these niche software companies. I've always this thought in the back of my mind that there might be money to be made building niche software because... well no one writes it. Although, I suspect thinking about it more, it might be developed by people who are selling something else (like the furnance HW company making software for gas power installation companies).
mattmanser 16y ago
I think you misjudge what people are willing to buy and how much money can be made from a niche. Some of these had potential to make a lot of money, like Net-Herald (charged way too little by the sound of it, should have offered massive commission to vendors), R10Clean (if he didn't he should have targeted consulting companies that supply sharepoint or inhouse enterprise solutions, this is a constant pain point for them), Clean Chief and DRAMA. And there are ones like Highlighter and PC Desktop Cleaner that had a massive potential market. After all RedGate are a famous start up and they sell simple programming utilities (simple in that they do one thing). Think if you hadn't heard of reflector, and they'd failed to gain traction, their story would sound exactly the same as Highlighter's. There's not a product on that list that I think had zero opportunity to start with, maybe chimsoft but he even managed to sell some copies for $2k each, so there was a demand. And as for interesting, for me the self-assessments was the interesting part as some people got it spot on and some people blamed totally random things for failure.

by jlgosse 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

I really liked hearing about these niche software companies. I've always this thought in the back of my mind that there might be money to be made building niche software because... well no one writes it. Although, I suspect thinking about it more, it might be developed by people who are selling something else (like the furnance HW company making software for gas power installation companies).

mattmanser 16y ago

I think you misjudge what people are willing to buy and how much money can be made from a niche. Some of these had potential to make a lot of money, like Net-Herald (charged way too little by the sound of it, should have offered massive commission to vendors), R10Clean (if he didn't he should have targeted consulting companies that supply sharepoint or inhouse enterprise solutions, this is a constant pain point for them), Clean Chief and DRAMA. And there are ones like Highlighter and PC Desktop Cleaner that had a massive potential market. After all RedGate are a famous start up and they sell simple programming utilities (simple in that they do one thing). Think if you hadn't heard of reflector, and they'd failed to gain traction, their story would sound exactly the same as Highlighter's. There's not a product on that list that I think had zero opportunity to start with, maybe chimsoft but he even managed to sell some copies for $2k each, so there was a demand. And as for interesting, for me the self-assessments was the interesting part as some people got it spot on and some people blamed totally random things for failure.