rianjs

tl;dr- How do you engage with VARs in a way that will get their attention?

In the last two years, several organizations has asked to license a medical spell check dictionary that I made years ago. After exchanging emails, I lost two of those, because I priced my product too high, and the third I landed (Indiana University School of Medicine), but I charged too little. (I'm OK with this, because it helps with credibility.)

I've got my pricing hammered out now, and I have a designer working on a home page, which should make it easy for individuals to buy. It comes with a real installer and works with Chrome, Firefox, and Windows & Office in a way that would be difficult to do by hand, and in a way that the competitors don't (despite their WAY higher prices).

- Much more competitive pricing

- Updates at a regular cadence with discounted yearly contract pricing. (= recurring revenue for me)

- Existing penetration is very high (tens of thousands of downloads), and most inquiries occur because their employees or students are asking for it

- Tooling geared for enterprises (deployable MSI)

- More features: works with all the major browsers, not just Windows/IE/Edge/Office

Well I got an email out of the blue the other day from a middleman in the UK who wants to license my product for use with computers that they distribute. (They're a distributors to other distributors, I believe.) They do quite a lot of disabled student allowance stuff, and they liked my pricing much better than the alternatives. I have a meeting with them next week.

They're VAR-ish, and it got me wondering how I could establish relationships with VARs here in the US as well. Do you have any advice on how to get the attention of a Staples or WB Mason or other VARs?

I was able to track down the original developer of a .NET icalendar library that had been abandoned. (It wasn't easy.) It had ambiguous licensing and copyright associated with it, which made me leery of using it for production tasks. He gave me explicit written permission to rename, open source[0], and relicense under a permissive license[1]. He also relinquished the copyright. I've also published a nuget package under the new name, Ical.Net[2]. The trouble is that if you look at the download stats, the older, buggy, under-performing library has many tens of thousands of downloads. It has a gravity to it that my library doesn't. How do I close the gap, and give people confidence that it's safe (and preferable) to use my library instead?

* It's unencumbered by licensing and copyright issues.

* It performs significantly better. The test suite completed in 17 sec; the current nuget package completes in 4.5, and I have an unpublished version that brings it down to 3.6. Performance was my original motivator for working on the library.

* I fixed about a half-dozen bugs while working on the performance

My plan of attack is as follows:

1) See if I can get the person who imported the original sourceforge history to commit a deletion of the code, and redirect people to ical.net via the readme.

2) Contact the original publisher of the unofficial nuget package, and ask them to unpublish it.

3) Have better API documentation. That's one thing the old package clearly does NOT have.

4) Maybe do a "Tell HN: dday.ical is now ical.net"(?)

What else should I consider? What else would you do? What would you NOT do? It seems to me that so long as the old code is floating around, and has a significant following, people are going to use that one instead. (I know I would as a naive outsider.)

[0] https://github.com/rianjs/ical.net

[1] https://github.com/rianjs/ical.net/blob/master/license.md

[2] https://www.nuget.org/packages/Ical.Net/

I'm a writer. Most of my work has been contract-based, and a lot of it has been protected by NDA for various reasons. That means my public portfolio for technical writing is rather slim. I'm unemployed, and I'm looking to transition into a full time role with a single organization rather than doing contract work on a piecemeal basis. I would prefer this to be technical writing, preferably for a software company (my first choice organization would be Oracle), but I'm not entirely picky. I mostly want to do interesting work with interesting people.

This morning I started work on a journalistic piece on audio encoding to follow up seven years after my last article on the topic (for Ars Technica), and I've been looking at the LAME project to see how it's changed over the years. Then I got to wondering if they had a documentation guy, and they do.(Roberto Amorim, the guy who hosts the head-to-head quality encoder shootouts on Hydrogen Audio). So I began wondering if there were other open source projects that need a technical writer to write documentation on a volunteer basis. (I'm audience-agnostic, so I don't care if it's for developers or end-users.)

My only criteria would be:

1) I'd get credit for writing/editing the documentation

2) It would have to be public so I could use it in my portfolio

3) It'd have to be worthy (yes, this is entirely subjective.)

4) The software has a release publicly available, and is under active development

It also wouldn't hurt if the project had some name recognition cred, but this isn't a hard requirement.

Know of any projects that could use a technical writer?

Most of the VC active on the web are investors in software generally, and Internet startups specifically. It's also pretty easy to find green technology and resource scarcity investors. This hardly covers the entrepreneurial spectrum, however.

How do you find the angels and other VC who don't specialize in these niches? Specifically I'm looking for media angels specifically, but the question is applicable across many other industries as well. In my particular case, it's a product that an organization buys, as opposed to content monetized indirectly.

How might I go about finding such an angel? It'd be a very small investment ($50K max), which limits my options further as most angels are looking for $100K min, FWIS.