Successful Software

Andy Brice has two successful desktop app products, Perfect Table Plan and HyperPlan [1], and both are written using C++ and Qt, IIRC; I read that on his blog [2], which I have been following for some time now. Lots of good info about product development and marketing there. [1] At least, Perfect Table Plan is quite successful, he has been selling it for a long time now. HyperPlan is newer, but IIRC he had some sales for it too. [2] https://successfulsoftware.net/

I have an OV cert for Windows, which is expensive enough. I just make sure to do a snapshot release using the new certificate to existing customers (through my newsletter and forum) a while before using it for new customers. That way there is time for the scary warnings to go away before any new customers see them. Digital certificates providers are basically checking your id (mostly automted) and multiplying 2 prime numbers together. Then charging you several hundred dollars. A 1 year Sectigo certificate EV with USB key is $431.99. Nice work if you can get it. I wrote this back in 2008: https://successfulsoftware.net/2008/02/27/the-great-digital-certificat… But it has got much worse since then.

Andy Brice has some great material at https://successfulsoftware.net/articles/ Including a list of books at https://successfulsoftware.net/reading-list/

It's off-topic, but I would like to thank you for your blog[0], I really like how open you are about your journey. [0]https://successfulsoftware.net/

There's a guy called Andy Brice[1] who has been developing and selling desktop software for table seating plans[2] since 2005. He blogs[3] a bit about his experiences and thoughts. [1] https://twitter.com/successfulsw [2] http://www.perfecttableplan.com/ [3] https://successfulsoftware.net/

The shareware concept is doing well, just the name has changed to "30-day trial" or "Lite" or "Free/Pro" or.... As an example, Andy Brice blogs about his shareware business at http://successfulsoftware.net/

Have you seen this 2007 thing about the awards scam? (http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/) > I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ‘software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software contains the description “This program does nothing at all”.

This guys are better than me to explain things probably : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/version-1-sucks-but-ship-it-a… and http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/07/if-you-arent-embarrassed-by-v… But I get all you points guys, no problem, and I find amazing that he managed to do all of that by himself.

Andy Brice wrote a great article about 'The software awards scam' for shareware. Does anyone know if website awards follow a similar pattern, or are they more legitimate? http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/

Payola and affiliate programs and such are not particular news. Industry analysts and consulting houses can have similar profit motives for their recommendations and implementations over the years, too. There was a bogus application that showed how shady some of the software award sites can be, too: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/ Even grocery and department stores can have financial considerations around product placement and the location and quantity of shelf space for a product that is made available within the store. When in doubt (and when you can), always follow the money.

We use Plimus and are very happy with them. I would recommend you avoid SWREG and other Digital River properties. Our experience with DR was very unpleasant and a quick Google search on "swreg scam" and a review of this summary: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/07/04/swreg-customers-beware/ should tell you why.

"Deja vue" I thought and lo and behold - http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam August 2007. How lovely of Watchguard to repackage the article, stamp its own copyright and publish it as "news".

So I came up in the post-retail days of software, but I sold CDs (once upon a time) and have had a coffee or hundred with folks who came up a few years before I did, including ones who operated spiritually similar businesses with retail components. (My CD sales were over the Internet.) Retail math is absolutely brutal. Consider software sold at a MSRP of $30, which might be squarely in the Scrappy Small Software Company Making A Go Of It range. The retail store itself practices "keystoning" -- it won't pay more than $15 for that SKU. It also generally won't (and certainly not if it is a Best Buy / CompUSA) pay when one expects it to pay, before receiving the product. Nope, it pays after (depending on the contract) sell-thru or sell-thru plus return window expiry. So who got the $15? Was it the software company? No, because CompUSA has better things to do than to talk to software companies, unless your company rhymes with Microsoft or Intuit. Instead, CompUSA purchased the software from a distributor. The distributor purchased it from a publisher; the publisher from the software house. Suppose your software company self-published, to capture the margins. Bully on you. You make about $10 per unit. Now let's return to that CD bit. Permit me to handwave, because it has been many years, but in quantity, shipped to your distributor, assume CD plus printed insert plus jewel case costs you $4. So, when everything works out correctly, you make $6 on a $30 sale. You…

Talked to a dev 5 years ago who switched from Qt. He stated it's ok on macOS but not suitable for iOS. https://x.com/kevmuhuri/status/1275488020414808066 This indie dev (uses Qt) shows the process for updating icons to the latest UI refresh https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/09/26/updating-application-icons-f…

Careful, this sounds like the 1% fallacy - just because 1% sounds like a small number doesn't make it an easy target. http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/

This is in fact a trap so common it has a name: The 1% Fallacy. https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/

>If you catch 1% of those people, https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/

As far as content being posted for free, that seems hard to stop. One suggestion I've seen to reduce people actually downloading them in lieu of buying: https://successfulsoftware.net/2017/03/10/honeypot-page/ As far as stopping purchases: you can just disallow suspicious origins from purchasing. E.g. if you know it's Amazon IPs, ban those, very few people will legitimately do that.

You can do marketing and sales yourself. In fact, since you can't afford to pay anyone to do it for you, you have to do marketing yourself. Writing a decent product website isn't that hard. For motivation, start by reading http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/10/16/marketing-hacking-the-human/ Then learn the basics of marketing (it's not rocket science) and apply the things you learn in practice.

"If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750." http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/

Not buying software does not mean that they won't buy anything. It simply means that particular business model (selling software licenses) does not work in China. But that's not the only possible model available, for example if you can package your software as training or something more tangible. I wrote an article a couple of years ago with some ideas to overcome this issue: http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/12/selling-your-software-in-chin…

For those who missed , Andy Brice interviewed some startup/projects founders who failed : http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-fail…

Yep. And I'm not advising people take an air of knowing it all when doing something like this. Sharing an opinion doesn't mean preaching an opinion. This was an interesting article to find above this one: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/07/if-you-arent-embarrassed-by-v… Most of your opinions and ideas are the same way. If you don't get them out there to be acted on and dented and molded and "bought", you don't get the feedback you need. You should probably be a bit embarrassed by ideas and opinions you have constantly. But iterating on them with others in the wild, like software, is a good way to improve them.

It gives numbers in the original blog post: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/ "According to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions began “awardmestars” is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the sites that listed the software emailed me that it had won an award (I don’t know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win quite a few more awards yet." "Addendum 2 -- 23 awards ‘won’ at the latest count."

It's not that curl isn't so bad, but that the lack of notarization is really bad. Distributing software safely is still a pain. Linux distributions have this kinda figured out a long time ago with signed packages - almost a requirement if you want to distribute your software on mirrors that you don't control. This is why it's safe to download a package from a Debian HTTP mirror and install it. The thing afaik any of them still don't do, and is really important too, is checking the signature with a revocation policy. I actually started writing about how I distributed a CLI for macOS, Linux, and Windows a few years ago but never finished it. If you are writing Go code you want to take a look at Equinox. I used it to distribute a CLI in my previous job, and it worked like a charm. One of the things I liked most was that I was finally able to push safe updates because I authenticated every release with my private key, and only allowed users to update if the key matched. If you have a primary and a secondary key, and a strategy to revoke it, this means you have a quite safe release…

You're quite right -- Next is nowhere near complete, and still very much a beta. We're working on the "release early, iterate often" approach. (See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/version-1-sucks-but-ship-it-a… http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/07/if-you-arent-embarrassed-by-v… The main reason is quite obviously for feedback. SoundCloud is a community-driven site, and we want to get really early feedback about features, design, etc. Another part of the feedback is exactly what's happening here with sharing our techniques and seeing the results. Hopefully the outcome of this blog post is that some other people will learn something, but also that some people will point out things so that we ourselves can learn. > there are many bugs, most features are not implemented, We're definitely aware of the features not yet implemented, but if you find bugs (or are really missing a particular feature), please do use the feedback form to let us know! Cheers, Nick