8 ms·
Ask HN: Does Shareware still work in 2018?
I put a lot of thought into a software which solves a real problem and could be licenced on a per machine basis. (Small company pays less than a bigger one - i.e. pay per use).
To go for a startup selling licenced copies, I would need an investor but I don't really know how much the product will sell. The investors like to see hockey stick graphs which I can't claim.
I know there are companies that created open source projects on github and then have businesses doing custom work around it, but I don't know if this will work for me.
I feel the product itself provides value and I would like to make some revenue off it.
Now I am thinking this is a good fit for shareware - i.e distribute freely - let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it.
I can distribute with source so if someone wants to modify sections they can do so.
Please let me know your thoughts.
- bhengaij 8y agoHonestly- just use UWP and sell on windows store. Hacker news is believe it or not, a very niche space with very few employees of big enterprises except the popular ones. You wont get to hear from the regular it worker here
- jchw 8y agoWhy UWP? Who buys from Windows Store? Not my parents. They started computers with buying software in boxes, but in the modern age almost all of their digital purchases are done on smartphones. Neither of them have any idea what Windows Store is. One of them uses Steam for games. Not most power users I know, most of which bawk at UWP apps and the concept of a walled garden store on their desktop computer. Many power users are more likely to use Steam to buy apps despite it being gaming focused. Anecdotally I see basically no group that would prefer Windows Store except out of ignorance or necessity. Buying on Windows Store means you don't get the Mac version if one exists. Admittedly, the same caveat applies in reverse to the more successful Mac App Store, but it's still something people have to consider. Microsoft has been pushing Windows Store pretty hard for a long time. They came to my University back when I was in college, a bit after the Windows 8 launch. They talked numbers but only in terms of the whole Windows install base and not even Windows 8 adoption. Definitely no numbers on Windows Store. To this day, I don't know if we've seen good stats on how much apps that were built and sold exclusively on Windows Store have fared. No doubt games have sold well - Microsoft can use its Xbox brand to deliver exclusives to Windows Store and not Steam - but I sincerely and absolutely doubt that success will translate to app developers.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoWindows Store apps are (relatively) sandboxed, and go through an approval process. For the average user, it is generally safe to let them know they can install anything they want off of it. This isn't true of most other places on the Internet, including some more poorly managed walled gardens. I've done a lot of support for senior citizens, and when they're looking for say, a card game, the Windows Store is fantastic. I use probably about a dozen Windows Store apps with some regularity, though being in IT and dev, I obviously use a lot of apps outside of it as well. But while I rarely will install a traditional app from a no-name developer for fear it might do bad things to my system, I am pretty willing to try new UWP apps. That's the key perk for someone just starting out/trying to make a living off small software offerings. The sandboxing offers a stand-in for trustworthiness. And of course, you don't have to stand up your own licensing servers, pay for bandwidth from downloads, etc.
- jchw 8y agoSandboxing is a useful property, but do Desktop Bridge apps even get sandboxing? If not it calls the whole thing into question. Android has an app store with mandatory sandboxing and you can't always trust it, even Apple with probably the most strict rules and review process have had some incidents. I would like sandboxing in general, but as a feature of Windows Store it's definitely not enough to win me personally over. I still remain unconvinced of the prominence of Windows Store and if I were to sell an app today I would guess mobile is the way to go followed by probably Steam or Mac App Store. Sidenote: it feels like you're more likely to get annoying ad supported software from app stores too. Even the built-in solitaire is ad-ridden!
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoDesktop bridge apps can request "full access" permission, which effectively evades sandboxing, but those apps are heavily scrutinized on review. In comparison, the Play Store has no manual approval process and an automated malware scanner that's industry-worst according to independent review. ;) Apple does a pretty good job though, and would be my general recommendation for mobile security. Note that while Android and iOS both have numerous examples of malicious apps in their store, AFAIK, Windows Store does not (though there are definitely ad-ridden nightmares in there). I found their reviews annoyingly onerous for a literally 50-line UWP app with a single function when I tried to submit something. The biggest benefit of their sandboxing though is not actually the security limitations of what they can access, but how it's installed, and more importantly, uninstalled. UWP apps are one-click remove, and do not leave any lingering garbage in the registry, as they have kind of like a "registry diff" inside their own folder. Apps like iTunes which are notoriously messy for install and removal I prefer over UWP because it's much easier to purge them safely.
- maccio92 8y agowhat kind of apps would you suggest developing?
- maxxxxx 8y agoNobody in a big enterprise can buy from the Windows Store. Better sell license keys from a website.
- pjmlp 8y agoI work at a very big enterprise and our W10 images have UWP apps bought by IT. Same applies to some of our customers that have done the migration to W10.
- kyriakos 8y agoIf you are targeting the enterprise I wouldn't recommend the Windows store as its blocked by IT department policy in most large companies.
- taprun 8y agoDonation ware is a thing, but it rarely works well. Besides, hockey stick growth on a product that is free to obtain and use isn't a surefire means of proving future profitability. The easiest way to make money is the old fashioned way: charge for it.
- bluedino 8y agoOr charge for support
- dchest 8y agoAny examples of successful companies that charge for support for their own free product?
- fsloth 8y agoWell, RedHat, sorta kinda, but not exactly what was meant here.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoBut who wants to work in support?
- ghaff 8y agoYou're not really describing Shareware (though in practice it may not have been a whole lot different). Shareware was software distributed under a try-before-you-buy license but the license actually required you to pay if you continued to use the software beyond a certain time period. Did this make a difference for most users? No. But, when I wrote shareware, I usually got one or two 4 figure site licenses per year from companies for my product. It was just a sideline but the difference between pure donationware and "you're really legally required to pay for this" did make a difference. That said, today I'd probably just do it as open source donationware though the money wasn't completely trivial for me at the time.
- nhebb 8y ago> You're not really describing Shareware These days, yeah, but the term shareware started out as OP described. It later became synonymous with trialware. https://asp-software.org/www/history/the-origin-of-shareware/ https://asp-software.org/www/history/the-origin-of-shareware...
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoEventually it became a rather derogatory term, I remember endless debates in the ASP about abandoning it, which I think they did in the end. A lot of it was on the covers of magazines or you could order a set of disks from people like Atlantic Coast: https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4709059216 https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4709059216
- ghaff 8y agoThe ASP at least for a long time took a hard line against crippling whether by feature or time limiting. After I moved on (and retail software started offering demos, open source became widespread, etc.) shareware evolved into the sort of crippleware, adware, etc. that you still see in some corners of the software world today.
- saluki 8y agoI would look at selling licensed copies yourself or create it as a SaaS. You can do both of those without investors. Put it out there for sale and test it out.
- Applejinx 8y agoIt's called Patreon. You've got to be established, though: can't come out of nowhere with a thing and expect to see much traction. I literally went from using Kagi for ten years, to using Patreon. At first it's a decimating change because you're going from 'sale of a product' to 'literally giving product away free and telling people they can support you if they like'. However, if your cashflow isn't too tough, one benefit is that Patreon is a LOT more stable and predictable than shareware ever was. You stop having boom and bust product releases and instead have months where you grow kinda briskly and months where you grow not so briskly. You're not making revenue off the product, you're making revenue off 'I am the one who makes products such as this'. I've got suggestions for what people should pledge if they would've bought my stuff commercially, but it's entirely voluntary and I'm also MIT-licensing it all. I'm airwindows on github, and as a website.
- john_moscow 8y agoThere's one big catch there - once you reach a "fair" income level, many people will think that you are already getting enough and won't bother to sponsor you. Look at the statistics [0]: unless you are in the top 100 creators, you'll get far less than your regular FAANG pay. [0]: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators
- jolmg 8y agoHuh. I didn't know Patreon published info on what creators are earning. Wouldn't that be a design flaw? What's the benefit to anybody? It seems to only deter potential sponsors.
- vidyesh 8y agoI don't think Patreon does. As you can see you cannot see that information for every creator. Publishers/creators can choose to show or hide the number of subscribers and their monthly earnings. This site simply is scraping that freely available information.
- 8y ago
- xiconfjs 8y agoshareware...even better with SALTO (selling digital secured locks): you can "try" their web based control software for 90 days...but you have to pay $150 for it.
- ForrestN 8y agoTalk to ten potential customers who you know would like to use the product. Ask them about various ways of paying for it, how much they'd be wiling to pay, and then turn them into your first customers.
- john_moscow 8y agoYou need to clearly understand the difference between making money from selling software licenses to your customers vs. having the investors as your primary customers. In the current market you will hardly find a private player looking for a return on their investment through profits/dividends; they will be more likely trying to cash out when you create enough buzz to get acquired or IPOed. That's a completely different game from the naive "sell licenses - make profit" option, but that's the game private equity plays in 2018. And no, desktop applications are not buzzwordy enough for that game, sorry. That said, there's plenty of money to be made selling desktop products to businesses. You just need to approach it differently, get the actual product/market fit, grow your presence organically, listen to your customers, learn from your mistakes and so on. Don't get discouraged by bootstrapping - you don't need a fully functional product to see if there is a market for the problem you are solving. Create a minimal prototype, write a few articles showing it off and tune in on the feedback. Once you start hearing from real people trying to solve real problems with your prototype, it will be very easy to find which next features will make your product more usable and will inevitably bring more revenue.
- marcus_holmes 8y agoThis, so much. The assumption that startup == investors is faulty, and in fact dangerous - investors don't share your priorities. Build the thing, and sell it (not necessarily for shareware, either). There are new channels for software now (like Setapp[0]) that you can look at, too, depending on who the customer and platform is. Then you can make decisions based on actual sales, demand, market size, etc, and if investors are needed at that stage, then you have a waaaaay better proposition for them. [0]: https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/
- abalone 8y ago“Still work”? Was there a time that shareware worked? Serious question.. citations appreciated. Also it sounds like you are doing enterprise software. Shareware was more of a consumer pricing model. With enterprise you want to make it totally free for small scale grassroots adoption by champions and then monetize large scale adoption.
- LeonB 8y agoShareware certainly did work for some, pre-WWW. Distribution was not a solved problem back then, and required significant capital. Shareware use a viral engine of growth (though this did mean that there were far more products for which shareware didn't work versus the handle for which it did).
- EamonnMR 8y agoDoom and Quake where sold as Shareware. Also, Ambrosia Software was flush with cash for a while there in the late 90s and early 00s.
- aasasd 8y agoBoth Carmacks had themselves each a Ferrari before they put out Doom. “Commander Keen” bought those Ferraris. Though I'm sure it was always a game of chance like everywhere in business.
- darkr 8y agoYou mean both Johns? (Carmack & Romero)
- aasasd 8y agoWell, I had Adrian Carmack and John Carmack in mind, but frankly I don't really recall who it was, just that there were two of them. Wikipedia mentions that “by mid-1994 John Carmack had purchased two Ferrari Testarossas,” so it's possible he was both of the guys. But I'm sure others did well too.
- tincholio 8y ago
- arrty88 8y agoDefine work
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y agoI've built a small tool that I distributed as "free for personal use, contact me for a commercial license", without technical enforcement, not even a nag screen. I made one (1) sale, despite receiving e-mails from several people thanking me that they're happily using it at work, and that sale was to a company who wanted customization, and only ended up actually paying the invoice when they asked for another round of customization and I pointed out that they haven't paid their last invoice. Donationware does not work for companies, I think - the bureaucracy required to make money move from the company to you will keep people from doing it even if they think you deserve it. If it is labelled as voluntary instead of a legally required license fee, it will also be hard to make it happen. If you're targeting companies, and want to do a shareware model, you should: * Make it easy to buy (with credit card etc.), but also provide a contact for volume licensing. If you're lucky, this allows employees to pay you for your software without having to go through approvals. * Make it hard to use permanently without buying (beyond just a nag screen, e.g. blocking the save feature once an expiration time is reached) Your goal isn't to convince someone to pay for the software. Your goal is to convince the person sitting in front of the computer that dealing with the bureaucracy to pay you is easier than not dealing with it, and if given the choice between a nag screen and the bureaucracy, the nag screen is easier to deal with.
- vbezhenar 8y agoIs using a crack easier than dealing with bureaucracy?
- alexgmcm 8y agoUsing a crack has both legal and security implications for the company and therefore at least in my place of work can result in serious consequences for the employee including termination of employment. So I'd imagine most people wouldn't risk it.
- vbezhenar 8y agoMost of nag screens implying that you should buy or uninstall software in 30 days or something like that. It's written in license. They just don't enforce it. So violating license is acceptable while cracking is not?
- wizardofmysore 8y agoHave a trial for a period you think is enough for the company to know they'll get value out of using your product and post that ask for a licence fee. To start with I suggest you give the MVP product for free. The users will be paying you with their feedback.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoFeedback from people who don't pay anything is useless if you want to build a business.
- ahje 8y agoEven if the feedback may result in improvements that would result in a product they _want_ to pay for?
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI used to believe that but eventually I became worn down by it all. You get so many "opportunities" presented to you that don't turn into anything that you have to take most of it with a pinch of salt. On the other hand someone who has put their hand in their pocket is going to get a lot of my attention.
- wizardofmysore 8y agoHaving built products from scratch I know for a fact that selling to the first 10 users is really hard but if you give it to them for free and get the feedback on what didn't work and improved on it - it makes selling to the next 100 people that much easier. Right now OP is making an assumption that his product is useful. It's a guess. Doing the beta for free for a small set of users validates it with small effort. In fact the first release should be as minimal as possible. Op can charge those users in the subsequent releases.
- partycoder 8y agoPay what you want is the best model.
- SquareWheel 8y agoDo you have any examples of this working successfully and sustainably for software?
- mherdeg 8y agoIn the line of business that AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. are in (IAAS/PAAS/SAAS) there is a related software concept called the "free tier". It's very popular.
- peterwwillis 8y agoI don't think just distributing it for free will net you revenue. Usually people need a reason to pay. I personally will pay for something if really want it, and I'm incredibly annoyed by the free alternative. Likewise, someone in a small team in a big company will use your software for free, but until they get annoyed enough by it, they won't convince their boss to pay for it to avoid the annoyance (or gain the premium feature, etc). In this sense, the value driving the purchase is the pain factor, not how useful the software is by itself. You should also tailor your business model to the product's market. If you have a broad market - home users, small business, large businesses, etc - some can use it for free, but some will still pay. If it's a smaller market - only small businesses - maybe only a few will pay if it's available for free. You can also change the business model to be free software that drives paying for something else - like a cool cli tool, but a much more useful premium GUI. Or a free tool that's easier to set up and use as a SaaS.
- mherrmann 8y agoI've been developing a cross-platform file manager [1] for the past 2.5 years. It is shareware with a nag screen. It currently makes ~$500 per month. Generally, I would say yes, shareware still works. But it is hard a) to write desktop software [2] and b) to convince people to pay for it. I would not give people the sources. It would make them feel even more like "I don't need to pay for this". What works for me is to be very transparent and tell people [3] "I'm one guy working on this, and am making $500 per month. This is not sustainable. If you like the project and want it to continue, buy a license". Feel free to hit me up on twitter @m_herrmann if you have further questions. :-) 1: https://fman.io https://fman.io 2: https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/11/15/python-qt-3000-hours-developer-insight/ https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/11/15/python-qt-3000-hours-deve... 3: https://fman.io/buy https://fman.io/buy
- dotdi 8y agoThe layout of your top-bar somewhat breaks[0] if I zoom in beyond 130% --- [0]: https://imgur.com/a/f9CATyj https://imgur.com/a/f9CATyj
- mherrmann 8y agoThanks for letting me know :-)
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoThis is not sustainable. If you like the project and want it to continue, buy a license Do you just nag or actually disable the product after a period? I was always surprised by the Sublime model, my experience indicates that if people can avoid paying then they will, even business customers.
- mherrmann 8y agoI just nag. I want the larger user base so people develop plugins [1]. 1: https://fman.io/docs/plugins https://fman.io/docs/plugins
- charlesdm 8y ago
- 8bitsrule 8y agoIf it's possible for your application, you might consider offering a 'feature-limited' aka 'crippleware' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crippleware) product to help you determine its potential usefullness to a wider audience. There are a number of approaches to doing that. After getting burned a few times paying $(100s) full-price for products just to find out that a feature I expected/needed was missing, I stopped doing that. I've since found some feature-limited stuff that lets me 'create-but-not-output' that I liked. If it turns out to be a hit, you can change strategy. If the audience is limited, you can move back to shareware.
- clort 8y agoI use QCAD occasionally which falls into this category https://www.qcad.org/ The author provides downloadable versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and the source is available on Github if you want to build it yourself or provide bugfixes or extra features. He provides some features as extensions in a trial mode which ends after 15mins or so or you can disable them. Its pretty neat and to be honest the price for the full version does not seem to be that much though the community edition has always been sufficient for my needs and has enabled me to contribute with bugs/fixes/features.
- mark-r 8y agoI worked on an application that transitioned from shareware to licensed way back in 1998. The revenue jumped between 2x and 10x with that transition. I can't imagine it's gotten any better in the intervening years.
- wuschel 8y agoSublime Text 2 comes to my mind.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago>let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it Just make a time limited trial, if they feel it is worth paying for then they will buy, if they don't then you don't owe them anything.
- clatan 8y agoHow about an evaluation period. People still do that.
- eps 8y agoGo with a trial model with online license activation. This works really well. More specifically - allow to use the program without a license for X days and the cripple it in some annoying way until the installation is licensed. Activation should pass some machine details to the licensing server, which will then pass back them hashed and signed. The program should have the public part of the licensing key embedded, so on launch it would read the license, verify the sig and check that the license still matches the machine. Also, for this to work well you will want to have some basic protection against reversing in place. It should not be possible to NOP the IF in the license check, replace the signing pub key or to side-load DLLs. This is a large subject of its own, but there are off-the-shelf solutions for this (called exe protectors)... though the con here is the perpetual hassle with false positive detection from anti-viruses and such. PS. I should add that "pay what you want" model doesn't work at all. It absolutely doesn't work for enterprise software and it doesn't even work with home users. It basically makes the software look not valued enough even by its own creator. Ditto for the donation model unless the active audience size is in 100s of thousands. Donation model is not really a model to begin with, it lacks predictability. Differntiating pricing tiers just by the user type - personal/home vs. business/commercial - works very poorly as well. People cheat. The only thing that really works as a price differentiator are the features. Pay more - get more. Also, charging for Windows Server installs 10x the normal price is a perfectly acceptable practice that works well. If you have any questions - ask, I'd be happy to answer what I can.
- gerasim_sergey 8y agoPlease tell me more, I have a small Shareware business and I earn more than $ 500 ;-). interesting statics ... i'm not sure that function restriction works better
- jakobegger 8y agoIf you want to make any meaningful money, you need to give people a good reason to pay. Asking for donations is not going to result in a lot of money. I've never heard from anyone making more than 500$ a year from donations for an app. So you will need to add some kind of restriction to make people pay for your app. The restriction depends on the usage type of your app. - If it is something that lots of people use everyday (like a text editor), you might get away with a nag dialog. Annoy a large number of people just a bit every day, and some of them will buy a license. - If it is something that people use just once (eg. a file conversion app) you absolutely have to require payment before people can do what they want, or they will never come back. - If is something that companies will want to customise, and you want to distribute source code, you probably need to charge a lot of money for it. Only few companies can afford to hire someone to write custom software, so you need to make sure you charge them enough that it is sustainable.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoLook at sites/software/etc that is offered for free that you believe offer very high value. There's a recurring trend. In spite of the value offered, the developers invariably end up short of revenue. This tends to result in ever more visible requests for donations or alternatives (such as swag) to try to spur revenue. And even with these appeals, the revenue tends to rarely correspond in any meaningful way to the value of what's offered. As an example Lichess (www.lichess.org) is an amazing service for playing chess. It supplanted services like ICC (internet chess club) and now competes against services such as chess.com and really stands head and shoulders above the rest of the sites. Now let's consider compensation. ICC had on the order of tens of thousands of users and charged around $50/year for what would have required extremely little overhead. They were undoubtedly making millions. Chess.com today is heavily ad-driven and works hard to push their users into a premium access model. No idea about their revenue, but they happily spend 5 figures a year in contracts just to get various players/streamers to exclusively play/stream on their site, and have an extensive paid staff. In contrast to these two sites, the founder of Lichess is able to gives himself a salary of $22,218, about $2k above the French minimum wage. It's not like he's then getting loads in options each year - that's it, that's what he gets for building software that beats out other sites making countless millions offering arguably inferior services. It sucks, because I wish this model worked, but I think it simply does not. There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exception.
- imgabe 8y agoWhy would you need investors to distribute a licensed product? I've used a number of programs at work that seem like they're developed by a very small shop or possibly a single person. They perform a small but important function that companies are often willing to pay a reasonable price to figure out. To be specific, it's importing tables from Excel to AutoCAD and Revit. It seems like this is something that AutoCAD and Revit should be able to do, but they handle it very poorly. http://www.cadig.com/products/ http://www.cadig.com/products/ http://dotsoft.com/xl2cad.htm http://dotsoft.com/xl2cad.htm Licenses are ~$30-50 each and every company I've worked at has happily paid it rather than let employees waste time fiddling with the terrible native functionality. I don't know how much the creators are actually making, but it seems to be enough to keep them going for the past 10 years or so.
- monokai_nl 8y agoMy color scheme https://www.monokai.pro https://www.monokai.pro is downloadable for free for Sublime and VSCode. It has a nag screen a la Sublime Text that tells you it's free for evaluation, but needs a license for continued usage. A small percentage of people purchases a license, but for sure not all 200K of them.
- huhtenberg 8y agoTo put it bluntly and I mean no offense whatsoever - you come across as completely nuts trying to charge 10 EUR for a damn color scheme. That's basically what 200K people think when dismissing your nag.
- monokai_nl 8y agoIt's a color scheme, user interface theme and icon set in one. Why do you think it's nuts to charge €10 for that? Do you think it should be free?
- huhtenberg 8y agoRationally it makes some sense, but irrationally - charging money for such triviality as a choice of colors is ridiculous. I can see buying _icons_ being a bit more justified, because it implies at least some amount of non-trivial work on your end, but I don't really know anyone willing to pay for better code editor icons. Also the fact that you offering to buy a "license" is off-putting, again considering the context of selling a set of RGB values. It's too grandiose, which too contributes to this looking nuts. Just say "buy" the scheme and it'll already be much better.
- monokai_nl 8y agoI understand charging for a code editor theme is not common practice. However, I don't see much difference between the work that goes into designing and developing a simple (Wordpress) web theme and a code editor theme. In the end a web theme is also a set of RGB values and other styling settings. And charging for that is acceptable. I think it depends on what you think is trivial and what is not. I think designing a coherent theme is not trivial.
- reacweb 8y agoAt my company, they want to pay for software so that they can ask support or blame someone if something wrong happen. I think, the best license is: expensive commercial license (to be taken seriously), free license for personnal use (to be appreciated by developpes), free time limited commercial license for software evaluation.
- dgudkov 8y ago>let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it. Don't rely on altruism to be a good indication of real demand. People like to get good deals. When you get for free something that is of good value -- it's a good deal and most people will go for it. The freemium model would work better to estimate demand.
- davidgh 8y agoI’ve been attached to the “shareware” industry since the 90’s, providing platforms to software developers to sell their products. It’s given me an angle of the industry that few get, namely, I’ve seem the sales number for literally thousands of different companies in the industry. The first thing I would say is that shareware (in the classic definition) is not really a thing anymore, but “try before you buy” software (which is really the evolution of shareware) is very much alive and well. The second thing I would say is that most people would be surprised by how much some of these companies sell. Certainly not everyone does well, but we see small companies selling tens or hundreds of thousands (USD equivalent) per month. Some reach seven figures a month. I can’t think of a single company that I’ve worked with that had VC-style funding. Most are bootstrapped with a small minority getting small “friends and family” investments. It is still possible to make a lot of money with try-before-you-buy software. A few tips: Don’t underprice. If you can provide enough value that they’ll pay something you’ve got more room in your price than you might think. Feature limitations work better than time limitations. 75% of you sales come within one day of the trial download, and of those, 75% come within the first two hours. It’s important that the product conveys why and how to buy. Don’t forget about other markets. In the early days most sales came from the US. These days, the US represents about half. When you get traction, consider translating your product and don’t forget to offer your product for sale using multiple currencies and payment methods. Third-party e-commerce platforms make this easy. They’ll also take care of a lot of the regulatory burden for you (taxes, export controls, fraud & chargebacks, etc.). If your product is targeted at large companies, offer premium support for a fee. Something as simple as a “response by email within one business day” SLA can be enough. SEO matters a lot in helping people find your product. High quality content about the problem your product solves helps a lot. In the early days find where people who need your solution are talking about their problem. Be transparent, offer genuine, non-spammy help as a solution expert and people will allow you to talk about your product. This can help a lot as you get established. If someone will donate, they’ll buy. You’ll feel more benevolent asking for donations but you’ll make a lot more money if you sell the product. We’ve seen both models. It’s not even close. If your product is not targeted to a highly-technical audience, open source might sound cool but means nothing to them. They won’t buy more because it’s open source. I could go on and on. I’ve said enough but there is still plenty of opportunity here. It takes time - be patient. Most of the successful companies I know started as a side gig.
- ezekg 8y agoOverall, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. You think you have a valuable product, but it doesn't sound like you've even validated that thought yet. I would do that first before getting caught up in these next steps. > let anyone who feels it is worth pay for it You should only do that if you want this to be a side project forever. If you want growth, charge people money. Most people aren't just going to donate money to you if they don't have to. Don't be shy about charging. People who find value in your software will pay you for a license to use it, especially businesses. If they don't find enough value to want to pay, then you don't have a good product yet and should talk to your users to determine value adds. > To go for a startup selling licenced copies, I would need an investor I don't see how you came to this conclusion. You can very easily license your software without investors, and charge customers per machine like you mentioned. I even built a business around that fact, which may also be able to help you start licensing your software quickly [0]. [0]: https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh
- tokyodude 8y agoIs SublimeText an example of successful shareware?
- matt_the_bass 8y agoCan you make this a SaaS? That might be easier.