8 ms·

Twenty dollars in an envelope

195 points by mijustin 14y ago

mijustin 14y ago
I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?
- th0ma5 14y ago
  I don't know about selling, but I had a hobby project, my first in Pascal, that would translate ProBoard (ProBBS, or a PcBoard door program that did fancy things) to and from RBBS (the other open source board software). I uploaded it to a couple of boards, some of which were FidoNet connected. Anyway, a few months later got a call I think from someone somewhere in the Navy that wanted to use it, and asked if I had any improvements planned. I didn't as I had already moved on to other things (probably Lemmings), but let them know they were free to use it as they see fit. As an 8 or 9 year old kid, I was amazed at the reach of technology, so it was very encouraging, and helped me to pursue a career in IT.
  - mijustin 14y ago
    Whoa! You were 8 or 9? I ran a little ProBoard BBS for awhile. ;)
    - th0ma5 14y ago
      well, maybe 10 or 11 now that i think back and do some googling around dates and such, but i know by like 12 or 13 i was more into guitar for a while
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  I used to compile a bunch of tech-product-related coupons and discount codes and tricks for saving money on buying the hot stuff of the day (RAM, DVD-ROM drives, etc) and sell that as a report on eBay.
  - mijustin 14y ago
    I always wondered about those. Did they make any money?
    - ahoyhere 14y ago
      I sure made some pocket money and got a job offer (editorial position) from a deal web site, which they unfortunately rescinded when one of my references foolishly mentioned how old I was.
- jws 14y ago
  I more or less paid for my computers selling a shareware¹ calendar program for Macs. It just let you make a one page calendar² of a month and type things in the days with some simple styling. I initially wrote it as a birthday present for my brother, who needed something to do that job, then decided maybe some other people would like it. It was popular with teachers. (Writing that I feel like a jurassic patio11!) I think it was $10, then I raised it to $15. These were pre-internet days, pre AOL even. It was fun getting checks from foreign lands, though it annoyed my bank. They eventually started charging $20 to clear a foreign check, so I had to adopt an unofficial “foreign folk get registered for free” policy and just thank them and tear up their checks when they arrived. I think the last check came in over 10 years after I stopped maintaining the program. ␄ ¹ Slightly nag ware. Registered users could make the solicitation screen stop showing up on launch. There was a secret little click dance you could do on the solicitation screen to prove you were registered. ² Pro tip: A “calender” passes the spelling checker, but is a machine in which cloth or paper is pressed between rolls until smooth. You will have to update your software and reprint your paper manuals when you discover this fact. Bonus Pro Tip: If you try to write a direct SCSI access disk utility, you may accidentally corrupt your only hard drive, not have backups of your source code, and then get to write a block scanner using only floppy based tools to scan the wreckage of your hard drive looking for blocks that might be C source code, collect those together, and reassemble your software sources as best you can. That's ok, version 2.0 is always better anyway, and you will have learned to keep backups.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  So perhaps not much of a story, but the Amiga came out and the first (for me) compelling "dungeon crawler" game on it was Dungeon Master. I spent a lot of time on it, and as was my custom, kept notes in my notebook. Pretty soon I had a pretty complete set of maps for the place, which a friend of mine wanted a copy of. So I made copies of the pages of my notes but they were hard to interpret (except for me!) and disorganized, so I opened up Deluxe Paint and just drew them (they were all 32 x 32 squares I believe) anyway, the drawing lead me to go in and check things, and I went back and looked for every single secret room etc, and end the end had a complete set. So I printed them out and gave them to my friend, who offered to pay me $5 for them. I wondered if anyone else would want them, and so I offered them up, a copy for anyone for $5. Sold a couple hundred copies. And to top it off, a German company that made 'player guides' bought a copy, decided they wanted to use it in one of their guides and offered me $50 for the "rights" to do that, and I gladly accepted. That ended up funding my purchase of a lot of games for the Amiga.
  - mijustin 14y ago
    I love this story! How old were you at the time? How did you "offer it up for others to buy?"
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Hmm, lets see the Amiga came out in '84 so I was in my mid-twenties. I originally posted availability on comp.sys.amiga as I recall. That spread to a couple of Compuserve forums and to BIX[1] [1] The BYTE Information eXchange which was a funny funny bulletin board running on a VAX. Edit: Apparently still valid in 1989 :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.misc/MGgdtxn5RqA/B1Ypz4COGIUJ https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.... although that isn't my address any more.
- MattGrommes 14y ago
  As an exercise in Windows programming I made a little alarm clock program called SuperAlarm that would use Winamp to play MP3s. I put in the readme that I liked Skittles and postcards; I got a number of postcards and one day I got a 1-pound bag of Skittles from someone in Canada. I still remember how great that felt even 15+ years later. Haha, I found a screenshot of the app: http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/SuperAlarm-Screenshot-121259.html http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/SuperAlarm-Screensh...
  - mijustin 14y ago
    Ha ha. That's awesome: a bag of Skittles from Canada! (as a Canadian, I appreciate this). Question: why did you decide not to put a price on it?
    - MattGrommes 14y ago
      It was probably a combination of not thinking it was worth actual money (it was the first time I'd made anything for Windows), and my early Linux era free software mindset.
- jerhewet 14y ago
  We did fairly well. http://books.google.com/books?id=mi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=zjIO6Aupod&dq=%22Living%20Legends%20Software%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=%22Living%20Legends%20Software%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=mi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA29&#... Good times...
- davebindy 14y ago
  Coming from a somewhat different viewpoint other than as a developer, I spent 10 years working as a full-time reviewer for one of the largest shareware disk vendors, Public Brand Software, and then later for Ziff when they bought PBS. (In fact, my first day at PBS was also the day Ziff took over the company...) There was a lot of money being made from shareware in the 80s and 90s. I was involved in the Summer Shareware Seminars (later rebranded Shareware Industry Awards) and got to talk to quite a few developers/authors who were making mid-6 figure incomes from shareware, and of course there were a handful that had made their million(s). They were pretty aggressive marketers, though, and not the kind who just wrote a program, distributed it through the BBS ecosystem, and waited to see what would happen. Disk vendors could make a considerable amount of money, as well. PBS was no Mom-and-Pop affair. Thinking back on it, there were 25-30 full-time employees (office staff, order takers, tech support, reviewers, catalog editors, in-house disk duplicating staff, 20+ line BBS, etc.) I have no idea what type of revenue the company generated, but it was a bustling place!
- smartician 14y ago
  In high school I wrote a turn based strategy game (think "Empire" with resources, like a very very basic "Civilization") and sent it off to a shareware publisher. The Internet and self-distribution wasn't invented back then. I was pretty disappointed when I received the rejection letter.
- cek 14y ago
  I had two wildly (for me anyway) successful Windows shareware apps in the '80s & '90s. WinPrint[1] and INIedit[2]. They were $25 a pop and I made way more than $10K from them over the years. Each payment (except a few juicy site licenses) came to me as a check in an envelope. The best part was WinPrint became my resume for Microsoft. It demonstrated that I was an expert in an area where demand was high: Apps on Windows that could actually print. [1] http://www.kindel.com/products/winprint/ http://www.kindel.com/products/winprint/ [2] http://www.kindel.com/products/iniedit/ http://www.kindel.com/products/iniedit/
  - cek 14y ago
    This blast from the past made me poke around some old code. My first shareware app was called TAPES I wrote in high-school. It was a UCSD P-System (Pascal) app that printed J-Cards for cassette tapes (the cards that list what songs are on the tapes; you insert them into the cassette case...for you little kids who never used cassettes). Given how few people on CompuServe had access to UCSD P-System, I don't think I sold very many copies :-) I eventually released TAPES using Turbo Pascal for the PC as well.[1] Printing has always been my thing. Another app I built, that was freeware, was called Spit. Spit printed your source code with headers/footers...originally WinPrint was called WinSpit... I'm super embarrassed by my rebellion against K&R the source demonstrates [2]. [1] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/MY_PAS/TAPES3.20 https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/MY_PAS/TAP... [2] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/C_SRC/SPIT153.C https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/C_SRC/SPIT...
- jim_lawless 14y ago
  In the late 90's, I began selling several command-line programs for Windows using the shareware model. I sold a command-line SMTP mailer (MailSend), a command-line POP3 reader (MailGrab), a command-line scheduler (TSched), and a command-line Dial-up-networking disconnect utility (HangUp). Total income over several years was in the low five-figures when bundling deals were included ( some people wanted to include these programs as part of bigger systems that they sold ). I created a successor to MailSend called MailWrench that provided better support for Microsoft Exchange Server and SMTPS (SMTP over SSL), but the market just didn't seem to be there for command-line mailers any longer. These programs are now free-to-run software with source ( with the exception of MailGrab).
- specialist 14y ago
  Yup. I wrote AutoCAD add-ons. Public domain and some shareware. The "big money" was in site licenses. Architects wouldn't pay for anything. But anyone doing work for the government was serious about making sure they had licenses for everything. Promotion and distribution were major challenges. You'd upload your wares to CompuServe, BBSes, etc. I'd also visit conventions and tour user groups. I never felt the need for classified ads (not targeted enough). The real shareware players had their own BBSs. I went a bit further and started a network of CAD/CAM, computer graphics themed BBSs and served as the hub. Much like FidoNet. It was huge fun, but a lot of work. Someone else noted that majority of income came from consulting/contracting and some writing. That was my experience too. I had the view "your work is your resume" and publishing shareware was the best way to get known. Much like working on some open source projects today.
- th 14y ago
  I gave away and eventually sold snippets of front end web tools (example code mostly) shortly after picking up basic JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills as a pre-teen in the late 90's. My first product was a "login" script (just JavaScript which generated an encoded version of a username and password and navigated to that URL). I remember when I received my first envelope with a $10 check and an email address inside. That was an awesome feeling. I also made a fairly complicated "calendar creator" script which allowed a user to stylize and customize a calendar template that would be output in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were the only tools I knew how to use that's naturally what I wrote the program using. Everything was output in a textarea field for "easy" copy-pasting into the user's website. After a few years I realized the programs were becoming dated (I started receiving more frequent refund requests) and I stopped charging and open sourced them. In hindsight, the programs were fairly poorly written but I'm glad to know that at least a couple dozen people found them useful.
ck2 14y ago
While the story is lovely, it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen. Also, this is another "right time right place" story - his code wasn't just good, it was one of the few solutions at the time. Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Forget bad things - it's quaint to think of the days where asking someone nicely to pay you if they like your product actually worked, to the tune of 5-figures. Nowadays you'd just get some kids on the internet explaining how them using your product for free is doing you a favor, "exposure" and the such. > "Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same." Isn't that besides the point? The point seems to be that there is always an ache that needs to be filled - often not needing a great deal of technical ability, just product insight. If he came around a few years later, there'd be just as many things computer users wanted solved.
  - Swizec 14y ago
    Let me introduce you to Amanda Palmer - The Art of Asking: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.htm... She got money to the tune of 6-figures by asking people to buy her music if they liked it.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
    Honestly, I doubt that much has changed except that there are more kids online. It's always been the adults who primarily paid for stuff. Even back then, there were probably lots of kids who used his software for free. Take home message: if you want to build consumer products and make money, target adults, not teenagers.
    - wtvanhest 14y ago
      I'd argue there are WAY more adults online now as a percentage of overall internet users now, than 15 years ago. Back in 1999 when I first started using AOL, adults would always ask young people for help. Most adults didn't see the value in it, and kids didn't need to see the value in it. The result was a very young population of people using the internet. Most people over the age of 50, even after 15 years are still so far behind people 30 an younger.
rhplus 14y ago
People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services. "would pay", 5,200 results https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.yc... "wouldn't pay", 38,000 results https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:ne... (OK, so it's kind of a joke response, but the abundance of free software and services has really driven down the expectations around reasonable payment compared to box software's heyday, even for software developers themselves).
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Don't drink the kool aid. There is still a lot of money being made. You don't hear about it because only an idiot would talk about his/her amazing sales.
  - mijustin 14y ago
    Hmmm. Only an "idiot" would talk about sales? Patio11 - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-other-stuff-year-in-review-2012/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o... Nathan Barry - http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/ http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/ Brennan Dunn - http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/ http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consulta...
    - ahoyhere 14y ago
      Sad that I'm not "idiot" enough for you to mention! ;)
      - mijustin 14y ago
        How could I forget about Amy! She's one of the first people I saw publish her numbers: http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products
meerita 14y ago
I literally sold dozen of games in diskettes back in the '90. I cannot say how much money I've made, but certainly, a lot to buy a 50cc. motorcycle and a pro BMX. Ah… those days! And also, I re-traded lot of shareware. I bought them from the magazines and sold the copies for the same price…
saddino 14y ago
I too, made my first sale as a shareware author on AOL, selling a Tetris clone for the Mac called Blox. I asked for $5 checks sent to my home address, and while I sold less than 100, the feeling of accomplishment and the incredibly nice notes included with those payments definitely kickstarted my entrepreneurial career and taught me to listen to my customers (hence Blox Arcade II released a year later for $10, sold via Kagi, and selling thousands of copies).
Uncompetative 14y ago
I sold my paintbox for £12 in 1988. It ran on a BBC Archimedes 310 in the shop window of the computer store where I bought it doing abstract expressionist artwork to show off its various calligraphic and airbrush tools in full colour. To put this in perspective Photoshop 1.0 was available back then, ran on a more expensive Macintosh and was black & white. I sold 4 copies and the shop took a cut.
thetrumanshow 14y ago
From 2004-2009, I basically built things I could have charged for, but didn't. I was afraid to take money from people. DHH (et al) to the rescue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY This is where the "Nice little Italian restaurant" SaaS meme was sourced from. He was hilariously spot-on. I caved and started building things I would charge for. I'm still just part-timing it, but my stuff is growing. And, frankly, I'm not the best Rails/iOS/Java developer out there. Literally if I can do it, you can too. Great, inspiring article.
- mijustin 14y ago
  So many people feel the same way. What was the scariest part about taking money from people?
  - thetrumanshow 14y ago
    In those days, two things: 1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers." 2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software. So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point for me. #2 is an ongoing concern, and always will be. Thanks for the question!
    - mijustin 14y ago
      I think the fear of rejection is huge. I'm a pretty confident guy (I'll speak in front of crowds without too much trouble). But the idea of putting a price tag on something and asking people to pay for it is scary. The biggest fear: "What if no one buys it?"
      - thetrumanshow 14y ago
        I had a leg up to begin with. I started with an audience (of sorts) that I was able to poll to gauge interest. I didn't start building until literally 200 people told me they would buy it from me. Turns out most of them were blowing some kind of sunshine (or else they found another solution before I could launch one to meet their needs), and very few converted... But, just the fact that they said yes to my product and price point gave me the confidence to start. But, I think you can hijack someone else's product-confidence... by which I mean you should find a 800-pound gorilla competitor in your market and just follow them into battle, and eventually outflank them. Not gonna lie, I did this too, because I got to a place where my market-vision was limited... so I piggybacked on a competitors market vision. :)
AckermanMD 14y ago
Jason Fried is so cool, he knew how terrible Filemaker Pro was before it existed! (Alright… it was probably 1990 already. Just had to point out the potential anachronism of 25 years ago being 1988 and Filemaker Pro being released in October 1990.)
- mijustin 14y ago
  Ha ha. Either the dates are a little hazy, or he was actually using FileMaker Plus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History Here's the earliest record I could find for AudioFile (1997): http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.com/p_audiofile.html http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.co...
fyi80 14y ago
When I was a kid, I mailed $5 to the address listed on a shareware disk, to get an unlock code for the full program. Never got a response. I think that was last time I fell for the rebranding-resale scam.
- mijustin 14y ago
  Do you remember which program it was?
the_unknown 14y ago
In my final year of University I decided to write some basic shareware that was helpful in creating your own custom theme for the recently-new Windows 95. After completing the app I put it out there to the shareware community. I attached a note to the program asking for $20 if you liked it. I was very clear with the program though that there were no additional benefits to registering other than a clean karma. The program was fully functional from day 1 and payment though highly appreciated was not necessary. Being the poor student that I was I also offered a great incentive to people - instead of sending me $20 they could photocopy $20 and just send me the scan. Yes, being a 20something about to graduate encouraged me to ask for money but I was still too scared to jump in fully. The crazy thing was that I started getting cheques from all over the world - and received some really cool scans of foreign currency that I hung on the walls as art. I even had the strange experience of receiving a note from somebody who lived in the apartment across from me who found the program and wanted to thank me (he was a student too so no money but having somebody at my University send me a thank you was even better than a cheque would have been). I'm glad I wrote the software and put it out there. Even though I didn't make enough to retire I had finally realized that working for yourself can be intensely rewarding in many ways. (I also learned a valuable lesson that even big companies can have problems writing cheques sometimes - I had one very well known software company send me some free games rather than a cheque.)
- mijustin 14y ago
  Surprised that the big companies had a hard time cutting cheques (normally, that's a non-issue). Maybe because your software was too "fun"? Do you remember how many people ended up paying you?
  - kingnothing 14y ago
    It's a giant hassle to get a purchase order approved for software at many large companies.
the_unknown 14y ago
In my final year of University I decided to write some basic shareware that was helpful in creating your own custom theme for the recently-new Windows 95. After completing the app I put it out there to the shareware community. I attached a note to the program asking for $20 if you liked it. I was very clear with the program though that there were no additional benefits to registering other than a clean karma. The program was fully functional from day 1 and payment though highly appreciated was not necessary. Being the poor student that I was I also offered a great incentive to people - instead of sending me $20 they could photocopy $20 and just send me the scan. Yes, being a 20something about to graduate encouraged me to ask for money but I was still too scared to jump in fully. The crazy thing was that I started getting cheques from all over the world - and received some really cool scans of foreign currency that I hung on the walls as art. I even had the strange experience of receiving a note from somebody who lived in the apartment across from me who found the program and wanted to thank me (he was a student too so no money but having somebody at my University send me a thank you was even better than a cheque would have been). I'm glad I wrote the software and put it out there. Even though I didn't make enough to retire I had finally realized that working for yourself can be intensely rewarding in many ways. (I also learned a valuable lesson that even big companies can have problems writing cheques sometimes - I had one very well known software company send me some free games rather than a cheque.)
easy_rider 14y ago
The best piece of advice he actually gives it build something you would use yourself (and would pay for it).
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Great interview. I assume the transcriber isn't a programmer: "database" and "readme" are pretty canonical programming terms.
- mijustin 14y ago
  OP here. I use a 3rd party transcribing service (so they're definitely not programmers).
exDM69 14y ago
When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk. There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too. Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide. The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.
Shivetya 14y ago
my first experience was writing a call back verification program for WWIV BBS systems. I do not recall how much I made, but it was a substantial amount. I think it was named CBVWWIV, I forget as the code is long lost. It was written in Turbo Pascal and supported ASCII, ANSI, and AVATAR, output. That was an interesting time to be involved in and at times I think it was more fun and entertaining that the net today.
coldpie 14y ago
I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive. To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway. But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work. It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.

195 points by mijustin 14y ago

I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

th0ma5 14y ago
I don't know about selling, but I had a hobby project, my first in Pascal, that would translate ProBoard (ProBBS, or a PcBoard door program that did fancy things) to and from RBBS (the other open source board software). I uploaded it to a couple of boards, some of which were FidoNet connected. Anyway, a few months later got a call I think from someone somewhere in the Navy that wanted to use it, and asked if I had any improvements planned. I didn't as I had already moved on to other things (probably Lemmings), but let them know they were free to use it as they see fit. As an 8 or 9 year old kid, I was amazed at the reach of technology, so it was very encouraging, and helped me to pursue a career in IT.
- mijustin 14y ago
  Whoa! You were 8 or 9? I ran a little ProBoard BBS for awhile. ;)
  - th0ma5 14y ago
    well, maybe 10 or 11 now that i think back and do some googling around dates and such, but i know by like 12 or 13 i was more into guitar for a while
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ahoyhere 14y ago
I used to compile a bunch of tech-product-related coupons and discount codes and tricks for saving money on buying the hot stuff of the day (RAM, DVD-ROM drives, etc) and sell that as a report on eBay.
- mijustin 14y ago
  I always wondered about those. Did they make any money?
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    I sure made some pocket money and got a job offer (editorial position) from a deal web site, which they unfortunately rescinded when one of my references foolishly mentioned how old I was.
jws 14y ago
I more or less paid for my computers selling a shareware¹ calendar program for Macs. It just let you make a one page calendar² of a month and type things in the days with some simple styling. I initially wrote it as a birthday present for my brother, who needed something to do that job, then decided maybe some other people would like it. It was popular with teachers. (Writing that I feel like a jurassic patio11!) I think it was $10, then I raised it to $15. These were pre-internet days, pre AOL even. It was fun getting checks from foreign lands, though it annoyed my bank. They eventually started charging $20 to clear a foreign check, so I had to adopt an unofficial “foreign folk get registered for free” policy and just thank them and tear up their checks when they arrived. I think the last check came in over 10 years after I stopped maintaining the program. ␄ ¹ Slightly nag ware. Registered users could make the solicitation screen stop showing up on launch. There was a secret little click dance you could do on the solicitation screen to prove you were registered. ² Pro tip: A “calender” passes the spelling checker, but is a machine in which cloth or paper is pressed between rolls until smooth. You will have to update your software and reprint your paper manuals when you discover this fact. Bonus Pro Tip: If you try to write a direct SCSI access disk utility, you may accidentally corrupt your only hard drive, not have backups of your source code, and then get to write a block scanner using only floppy based tools to scan the wreckage of your hard drive looking for blocks that might be C source code, collect those together, and reassemble your software sources as best you can. That's ok, version 2.0 is always better anyway, and you will have learned to keep backups.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
So perhaps not much of a story, but the Amiga came out and the first (for me) compelling "dungeon crawler" game on it was Dungeon Master. I spent a lot of time on it, and as was my custom, kept notes in my notebook. Pretty soon I had a pretty complete set of maps for the place, which a friend of mine wanted a copy of. So I made copies of the pages of my notes but they were hard to interpret (except for me!) and disorganized, so I opened up Deluxe Paint and just drew them (they were all 32 x 32 squares I believe) anyway, the drawing lead me to go in and check things, and I went back and looked for every single secret room etc, and end the end had a complete set. So I printed them out and gave them to my friend, who offered to pay me $5 for them. I wondered if anyone else would want them, and so I offered them up, a copy for anyone for $5. Sold a couple hundred copies. And to top it off, a German company that made 'player guides' bought a copy, decided they wanted to use it in one of their guides and offered me $50 for the "rights" to do that, and I gladly accepted. That ended up funding my purchase of a lot of games for the Amiga.
- mijustin 14y ago
  I love this story! How old were you at the time? How did you "offer it up for others to buy?"
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Hmm, lets see the Amiga came out in '84 so I was in my mid-twenties. I originally posted availability on comp.sys.amiga as I recall. That spread to a couple of Compuserve forums and to BIX[1] [1] The BYTE Information eXchange which was a funny funny bulletin board running on a VAX. Edit: Apparently still valid in 1989 :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.misc/MGgdtxn5RqA/B1Ypz4COGIUJ https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.... although that isn't my address any more.
MattGrommes 14y ago
As an exercise in Windows programming I made a little alarm clock program called SuperAlarm that would use Winamp to play MP3s. I put in the readme that I liked Skittles and postcards; I got a number of postcards and one day I got a 1-pound bag of Skittles from someone in Canada. I still remember how great that felt even 15+ years later. Haha, I found a screenshot of the app: http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/SuperAlarm-Screenshot-121259.html http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/SuperAlarm-Screensh...
- mijustin 14y ago
  Ha ha. That's awesome: a bag of Skittles from Canada! (as a Canadian, I appreciate this). Question: why did you decide not to put a price on it?
  - MattGrommes 14y ago
    It was probably a combination of not thinking it was worth actual money (it was the first time I'd made anything for Windows), and my early Linux era free software mindset.
jerhewet 14y ago
We did fairly well. http://books.google.com/books?id=mi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=zjIO6Aupod&dq=%22Living%20Legends%20Software%22&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=%22Living%20Legends%20Software%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=mi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA29&#... Good times...
davebindy 14y ago
Coming from a somewhat different viewpoint other than as a developer, I spent 10 years working as a full-time reviewer for one of the largest shareware disk vendors, Public Brand Software, and then later for Ziff when they bought PBS. (In fact, my first day at PBS was also the day Ziff took over the company...) There was a lot of money being made from shareware in the 80s and 90s. I was involved in the Summer Shareware Seminars (later rebranded Shareware Industry Awards) and got to talk to quite a few developers/authors who were making mid-6 figure incomes from shareware, and of course there were a handful that had made their million(s). They were pretty aggressive marketers, though, and not the kind who just wrote a program, distributed it through the BBS ecosystem, and waited to see what would happen. Disk vendors could make a considerable amount of money, as well. PBS was no Mom-and-Pop affair. Thinking back on it, there were 25-30 full-time employees (office staff, order takers, tech support, reviewers, catalog editors, in-house disk duplicating staff, 20+ line BBS, etc.) I have no idea what type of revenue the company generated, but it was a bustling place!
smartician 14y ago
In high school I wrote a turn based strategy game (think "Empire" with resources, like a very very basic "Civilization") and sent it off to a shareware publisher. The Internet and self-distribution wasn't invented back then. I was pretty disappointed when I received the rejection letter.
cek 14y ago
I had two wildly (for me anyway) successful Windows shareware apps in the '80s & '90s. WinPrint[1] and INIedit[2]. They were $25 a pop and I made way more than $10K from them over the years. Each payment (except a few juicy site licenses) came to me as a check in an envelope. The best part was WinPrint became my resume for Microsoft. It demonstrated that I was an expert in an area where demand was high: Apps on Windows that could actually print. [1] http://www.kindel.com/products/winprint/ http://www.kindel.com/products/winprint/ [2] http://www.kindel.com/products/iniedit/ http://www.kindel.com/products/iniedit/
- cek 14y ago
  This blast from the past made me poke around some old code. My first shareware app was called TAPES I wrote in high-school. It was a UCSD P-System (Pascal) app that printed J-Cards for cassette tapes (the cards that list what songs are on the tapes; you insert them into the cassette case...for you little kids who never used cassettes). Given how few people on CompuServe had access to UCSD P-System, I don't think I sold very many copies :-) I eventually released TAPES using Turbo Pascal for the PC as well.[1] Printing has always been my thing. Another app I built, that was freeware, was called Spit. Spit printed your source code with headers/footers...originally WinPrint was called WinSpit... I'm super embarrassed by my rebellion against K&R the source demonstrates [2]. [1] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/MY_PAS/TAPES3.20 https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/MY_PAS/TAP... [2] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/C_SRC/SPIT153.C https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/C_SRC/SPIT...
jim_lawless 14y ago
In the late 90's, I began selling several command-line programs for Windows using the shareware model. I sold a command-line SMTP mailer (MailSend), a command-line POP3 reader (MailGrab), a command-line scheduler (TSched), and a command-line Dial-up-networking disconnect utility (HangUp). Total income over several years was in the low five-figures when bundling deals were included ( some people wanted to include these programs as part of bigger systems that they sold ). I created a successor to MailSend called MailWrench that provided better support for Microsoft Exchange Server and SMTPS (SMTP over SSL), but the market just didn't seem to be there for command-line mailers any longer. These programs are now free-to-run software with source ( with the exception of MailGrab).
specialist 14y ago
Yup. I wrote AutoCAD add-ons. Public domain and some shareware. The "big money" was in site licenses. Architects wouldn't pay for anything. But anyone doing work for the government was serious about making sure they had licenses for everything. Promotion and distribution were major challenges. You'd upload your wares to CompuServe, BBSes, etc. I'd also visit conventions and tour user groups. I never felt the need for classified ads (not targeted enough). The real shareware players had their own BBSs. I went a bit further and started a network of CAD/CAM, computer graphics themed BBSs and served as the hub. Much like FidoNet. It was huge fun, but a lot of work. Someone else noted that majority of income came from consulting/contracting and some writing. That was my experience too. I had the view "your work is your resume" and publishing shareware was the best way to get known. Much like working on some open source projects today.
th 14y ago
I gave away and eventually sold snippets of front end web tools (example code mostly) shortly after picking up basic JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills as a pre-teen in the late 90's. My first product was a "login" script (just JavaScript which generated an encoded version of a username and password and navigated to that URL). I remember when I received my first envelope with a $10 check and an email address inside. That was an awesome feeling. I also made a fairly complicated "calendar creator" script which allowed a user to stylize and customize a calendar template that would be output in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were the only tools I knew how to use that's naturally what I wrote the program using. Everything was output in a textarea field for "easy" copy-pasting into the user's website. After a few years I realized the programs were becoming dated (I started receiving more frequent refund requests) and I stopped charging and open sourced them. In hindsight, the programs were fairly poorly written but I'm glad to know that at least a couple dozen people found them useful.

ck2 14y ago

While the story is lovely, it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen. Also, this is another "right time right place" story - his code wasn't just good, it was one of the few solutions at the time. Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same.

potatolicious 14y ago
Forget bad things - it's quaint to think of the days where asking someone nicely to pay you if they like your product actually worked, to the tune of 5-figures. Nowadays you'd just get some kids on the internet explaining how them using your product for free is doing you a favor, "exposure" and the such. > "Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same." Isn't that besides the point? The point seems to be that there is always an ache that needs to be filled - often not needing a great deal of technical ability, just product insight. If he came around a few years later, there'd be just as many things computer users wanted solved.
- Swizec 14y ago
  Let me introduce you to Amanda Palmer - The Art of Asking: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.htm... She got money to the tune of 6-figures by asking people to buy her music if they liked it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
  Honestly, I doubt that much has changed except that there are more kids online. It's always been the adults who primarily paid for stuff. Even back then, there were probably lots of kids who used his software for free. Take home message: if you want to build consumer products and make money, target adults, not teenagers.
  - wtvanhest 14y ago
    I'd argue there are WAY more adults online now as a percentage of overall internet users now, than 15 years ago. Back in 1999 when I first started using AOL, adults would always ask young people for help. Most adults didn't see the value in it, and kids didn't need to see the value in it. The result was a very young population of people using the internet. Most people over the age of 50, even after 15 years are still so far behind people 30 an younger.

rhplus 14y ago

People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services. "would pay", 5,200 results https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.yc... "wouldn't pay", 38,000 results https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:news.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:ne... (OK, so it's kind of a joke response, but the abundance of free software and services has really driven down the expectations around reasonable payment compared to box software's heyday, even for software developers themselves).

orangethirty 14y ago
Don't drink the kool aid. There is still a lot of money being made. You don't hear about it because only an idiot would talk about his/her amazing sales.
- mijustin 14y ago
  Hmmm. Only an "idiot" would talk about sales? Patio11 - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-other-stuff-year-in-review-2012/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o... Nathan Barry - http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/ http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/ Brennan Dunn - http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consultancy/ http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consulta...
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    Sad that I'm not "idiot" enough for you to mention! ;)
    - mijustin 14y ago
      How could I forget about Amy! She's one of the first people I saw publish her numbers: http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products

meerita 14y ago

I literally sold dozen of games in diskettes back in the '90. I cannot say how much money I've made, but certainly, a lot to buy a 50cc. motorcycle and a pro BMX. Ah… those days! And also, I re-traded lot of shareware. I bought them from the magazines and sold the copies for the same price…

saddino 14y ago

I too, made my first sale as a shareware author on AOL, selling a Tetris clone for the Mac called Blox. I asked for $5 checks sent to my home address, and while I sold less than 100, the feeling of accomplishment and the incredibly nice notes included with those payments definitely kickstarted my entrepreneurial career and taught me to listen to my customers (hence Blox Arcade II released a year later for $10, sold via Kagi, and selling thousands of copies).

Uncompetative 14y ago

I sold my paintbox for £12 in 1988. It ran on a BBC Archimedes 310 in the shop window of the computer store where I bought it doing abstract expressionist artwork to show off its various calligraphic and airbrush tools in full colour. To put this in perspective Photoshop 1.0 was available back then, ran on a more expensive Macintosh and was black & white. I sold 4 copies and the shop took a cut.

thetrumanshow 14y ago

From 2004-2009, I basically built things I could have charged for, but didn't. I was afraid to take money from people. DHH (et al) to the rescue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY This is where the "Nice little Italian restaurant" SaaS meme was sourced from. He was hilariously spot-on. I caved and started building things I would charge for. I'm still just part-timing it, but my stuff is growing. And, frankly, I'm not the best Rails/iOS/Java developer out there. Literally if I can do it, you can too. Great, inspiring article.

mijustin 14y ago
So many people feel the same way. What was the scariest part about taking money from people?
- thetrumanshow 14y ago
  In those days, two things: 1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers." 2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software. So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point for me. #2 is an ongoing concern, and always will be. Thanks for the question!
  - mijustin 14y ago
    I think the fear of rejection is huge. I'm a pretty confident guy (I'll speak in front of crowds without too much trouble). But the idea of putting a price tag on something and asking people to pay for it is scary. The biggest fear: "What if no one buys it?"
    - thetrumanshow 14y ago
      I had a leg up to begin with. I started with an audience (of sorts) that I was able to poll to gauge interest. I didn't start building until literally 200 people told me they would buy it from me. Turns out most of them were blowing some kind of sunshine (or else they found another solution before I could launch one to meet their needs), and very few converted... But, just the fact that they said yes to my product and price point gave me the confidence to start. But, I think you can hijack someone else's product-confidence... by which I mean you should find a 800-pound gorilla competitor in your market and just follow them into battle, and eventually outflank them. Not gonna lie, I did this too, because I got to a place where my market-vision was limited... so I piggybacked on a competitors market vision. :)

AckermanMD 14y ago

Jason Fried is so cool, he knew how terrible Filemaker Pro was before it existed! (Alright… it was probably 1990 already. Just had to point out the potential anachronism of 25 years ago being 1988 and Filemaker Pro being released in October 1990.)

mijustin 14y ago
Ha ha. Either the dates are a little hazy, or he was actually using FileMaker Plus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History Here's the earliest record I could find for AudioFile (1997): http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.com/p_audiofile.html http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.co...

fyi80 14y ago

When I was a kid, I mailed $5 to the address listed on a shareware disk, to get an unlock code for the full program. Never got a response. I think that was last time I fell for the rebranding-resale scam.

mijustin 14y ago
Do you remember which program it was?

the_unknown 14y ago

In my final year of University I decided to write some basic shareware that was helpful in creating your own custom theme for the recently-new Windows 95. After completing the app I put it out there to the shareware community. I attached a note to the program asking for $20 if you liked it. I was very clear with the program though that there were no additional benefits to registering other than a clean karma. The program was fully functional from day 1 and payment though highly appreciated was not necessary. Being the poor student that I was I also offered a great incentive to people - instead of sending me $20 they could photocopy $20 and just send me the scan. Yes, being a 20something about to graduate encouraged me to ask for money but I was still too scared to jump in fully. The crazy thing was that I started getting cheques from all over the world - and received some really cool scans of foreign currency that I hung on the walls as art. I even had the strange experience of receiving a note from somebody who lived in the apartment across from me who found the program and wanted to thank me (he was a student too so no money but having somebody at my University send me a thank you was even better than a cheque would have been). I'm glad I wrote the software and put it out there. Even though I didn't make enough to retire I had finally realized that working for yourself can be intensely rewarding in many ways. (I also learned a valuable lesson that even big companies can have problems writing cheques sometimes - I had one very well known software company send me some free games rather than a cheque.)

mijustin 14y ago
Surprised that the big companies had a hard time cutting cheques (normally, that's a non-issue). Maybe because your software was too "fun"? Do you remember how many people ended up paying you?
- kingnothing 14y ago
  It's a giant hassle to get a purchase order approved for software at many large companies.

the_unknown 14y ago

easy_rider 14y ago

The best piece of advice he actually gives it build something you would use yourself (and would pay for it).

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

Great interview. I assume the transcriber isn't a programmer: "database" and "readme" are pretty canonical programming terms.

mijustin 14y ago
OP here. I use a 3rd party transcribing service (so they're definitely not programmers).

exDM69 14y ago

When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk. There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too. Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide. The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.

Shivetya 14y ago

my first experience was writing a call back verification program for WWIV BBS systems. I do not recall how much I made, but it was a substantial amount. I think it was named CBVWWIV, I forget as the code is long lost. It was written in Turbo Pascal and supported ASCII, ANSI, and AVATAR, output. That was an interesting time to be involved in and at times I think it was more fun and entertaining that the net today.

coldpie 14y ago

I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive. To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway. But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work. It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.