I paid for a commercial graphics program this week, and it was really hard for me to do, even though I know it will save me time. All I see are the (relatively few) bugs, and all I can think about are how I would have done it better.
This could also be why "dev tools" are such a tarpit: at a certain stage, everybody realizes "I can write an XYZ!" (where XYZ = bug tracker, blog publisher, text editor, ...). The flip side is that if your target audience is programmers themselves, they'll be less likely to pay you because they know how to do all this, too.
The people I've seen with the most success are those who sell to the people furthest from those who can do it themselves. If I were starting a restaurant I wouldn't try to market it primarily to chefs.
You are absolutely correct that it would take me a long time to do any of it. (I'm also bad at estimating how long things take, BTW!)
Then again, for most big polished software I use, I don't use most of its features ever. There may be icebergs, but chances are most of them are in code that I wouldn't write in the first place, if I was only writing for myself.
Shit. If I had your talent I'd make a fortune. This is exactly why good programmers need to team up with biz guys.
Once you reach a certain point as a programmer, you feel like you could do anything in the space of things that is possible to do. It just takes an unbounded amount of time. Anything you don't know you could learn given sufficient motivation to do so.
It may not actually be true however.
I still find it amazing what software people pay for, even knowing that my mindset is wrong. Add in free/open source software and you will find the average developer attaches little monetary value to most software they create.
Then, I went to work at a startup that actually made good money on a "virtual" product for regular people. I was just blown away that people would pay for something like that, and I learned in aggregate how much value a small purchase or monthly subscriber could have, even if the segment of users that paid was small.
With my new startup I knew if we put a price on it and charged, enough people would pay to keep us alive. Here we are just a few months in, able to pay ourselves and go full time on it. It's so empowering. I will be hesitant to do "free" or even "cheap" ever again after this.
Tell us more about it! What are you doing, how did you market it, how did you find customers, please!
That explains a lot about our growth after launching. I did respond to your email, Thanks!
I just had my first sale of my software this past weekend, and it was fantastic: http://www.keacher.com/1060/how-i-got-to-my-first-sale/
WTF does this even mean?
They had the discussion in a coffee shop. Have they paid for their coffee? Their cake? While doing so, have they checked their mails in the phones they had paid for, that come with contracts they pay for?
Were they wearing clothes that they had paid for? Did they carry paid-for backpacks with paid-for laptops inside, each with several paid-for apps, from Keynote to Microsoft Windows? Was the coffee shop furnished with paid-for furniture and decorations?
'$10 seems like a lot of money. It can feel unimaginable people will hand over $10'
Really? If something will save me even a few minutes on an ongoing basis - or provide a bit more value - $10 is a pretty small price to pay. For example:
- $7 / month for Github - $29 / month for Kiss Insights survey tool - $50 / year for Crashplan
...and these are just a few. I'm a bit more on the business / marketing side of things than development, so I likely have a different mindset. But I'll happily pay for great products that make me more efficient or save me time....
- Either know an interesting domain / niche-market which is not known by thousands of other developers (This is suprisingly hard for me)
- Or you have to work your ass off / be very smart to create something which is significatnly better then the free alternatives. Because, most of the time, there are free alternatives, and most of the time they are good enough. Sometimes they are not just good enough, but they even have enthusiastic fans.
(The third alternative is to create something so innovative that has no competitors, but there is a huge risk that the idea is just not good enough, there is not enough user need for it)
I am working on a markdown editor for windows (in fact multiplatform, developed in Qt), which no doubt will be the best in its category. The question is not that whether will it be the best or not, the question is this: Is the free alternative good enough? The answer is not trivial.
I was amazed when my partner pitched it to me, but after a little research we launched with about 40 hours of coding. First "big" day of stripe transfers hitting my account tomorrow and I'm damn near giddy. Probably not ever going to be anything more than a few hundred bucks a month, but its a nice little ATM and seems like its going to be on autopilot with the next code update with maintenance needs of just an hour or two a week.
What you really want to do is provide value by letting customers do something that is otherwise impossible or painful.
For instance buffer lets you sleep while you tweet. That is much more valuable than saving time.
There is a guy on twitter (@pricing) that talks about pricing, go read a few hundred of his tweets and see it helps you get your mind wrapped around pricing better.
I found myself on a team of (non-IT) consultants all billing $150+/hr and suddenly that $20/50/100/whatever per month SaaS charge is absolutely meaningless. It's really nothing to the company. It just doesn't even register as a "real" expense.
