Notes on Starting a Software Buisness

Someone forwarded me a link to this article recently.

It is titled "How To Successfully Compete With Open Source Software", but could just as well be how to start a small software business on the side.

I run Bingo Card Creator, which makes educational bingo cards for teachers and parents. It is about as B2C as you can get. Sales last year were in the $20,000 range, sales this year are up substantially, and I expect profits will exceed my day job salary/benefits/etc by the end of April. I started the business in July 2006, when there were already at least two OSS projects which did roughly the same thing: BingoCardMaker and bingo-cards. (You can tell we really spend a lot of time thinking about naming in my niche, can’t you.)

The tweet-able intro to marketing is short and to the point:

Software solves problems. Customers have problems. Customers do not know that their problems are sometimes solvable with software.

Worth a read.