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khampton

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Marketing Software

I'm trying to do a little research on how to market software -- I've written a couple of neat productivity desktop apps and I have also written several very useful ActiveX .dlls. (some written in VB and others written in C++).

Do developers really make much from their shareware products?  Any suggestions on which service to do business with?  

How about direct marketing?  Anyone making money this way?

What about making a website, listing my products and trying to register with other links?

How about approaching a vendor that offers software (or software components) that would benefit by adding my goods to their portfollio of products?

I could really benefit from some honest feedback.

Thanks in advance!
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MacTruck

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khampton

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To: MacTruck
From: khampton

I'm not rejecting your answer based on merit - I just want to keep this question open for more comments.

I think we all will profit from the advice of developers who have made some serious money from their products.

I will award the points to the best response.  Thanks.
First, second and third - make sure the software is absolutely top quality, and verified on lots of systems.  Without the basics right, you won't stand a chance.  There will probably be a lot of competition, depending on the type of programs you've written.  Don't expect to make a fortune overnight.

If you are dipping your toe in the water, a good plan would be to put together a simple web site, with back end processing of orders by www.regsoft.com (I've never used paypal myself, but if you do a search on it, plently of people are unhappy with them).  If you're looking to go full time on it immediately, you're probably better off going with MacTruck's suggestion of a publisher, because you'll need a larger number of orders than a small website will probably bring in.

Direct marketing is horrible.  Only contemplate it if the software you've produced has a small niche market, and you know exactly what you're doing.

Good luck!
I know a guy who built a great utility as an add-on for browsers, and sold it initially through CDs on magazine covers - the publishers will pay to license software for mag covers if it's good, and you can distribute a free version, but it gives you an 'in' with customers - if your software is great, and very useful to everyone, then maybe 1 in 1000 who install the free version will pay you $20 for the supported version, which for the big-circulation mags would be quite a revenue.  I just made these figures up, by the way.  Do some solid market research and talk to someone who does it for a 'living' if you can.  Good luck!!
Also, I think I am right here, so correct me if you know otherwise, but every single PC software product we ever use started off as being written by someone in a garage in their spare time.  Big companies such as MS tend to prefer to buy products that already work and have a market, rather than risk writing one themselves from scratch.  Your best chance of getting rich is by selling the product, whole, to one of the big boys.  The shareware route, I would say, is just to put a crust on the table while you build market share to the point where they take notice of you and offer to buy your company ;-)
what about making the softwares open source
Thanks to everyone who commented!