Ask HN: Organizations keep trying to give me money for a thing I made
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?