
Ask HN: Best way to get pre-orders for software products? - colinmcd
I&#x27;m looking for a way to get pre-orders for a software project. This would useful for validating an idea before sinking to much time into it. I&#x27;m imagining something similar to Kickstarter, but for whatever reason Kickstarter seem to work particularly well for software other than games.
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elsyms
You're going to find it very difficult to get people to invest their money in
something that has no demo or detailed information. Your best bet is to create
a minimum viable product and get feedback from the community (HackerNews could
help).

The "Ghost" blogging platform's Kickstarter is one of my all time favourites
(notice how they had something to show their users before asking for money):
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-
just-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-
blogging-platform)

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johnonolan
Thanks for the kind words :) I wrote a series of posts a while back about all
of the thinking which went into the campaign [https://john.onolan.org/the-
anatomy-of-a-successful-kickstar...](https://john.onolan.org/the-anatomy-of-a-
successful-kickstarter-campaign/) \- OP might find that useful. We borrowed a
lot from other campaigns that came before us (Ouya/Pebble/etc)

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joshribakoff
I was asked to take a contract project that I recognized as an UI component /
app lots of businesses in that industry would need. I gave them a good price
in exchange for me retaining the resell rights on the code. The contract was
profitable, and afterwards I invested a few days time into creating a basic
landing/sales page with an email address/contact form.

I then searched on Google for forum posts from other developers posting on
programming QA sites & forums, trying to create the same UI component / app &
having issues. I gave them advice about their code, and also shamelessly
plugged my commercial UI component / app & suggested purchasing it as another
solution to their problem.

Even if no one else purchased it, I was already paid to create it once. But it
did work, I sold my UI component / app 1,000 times. I would sometimes make
deals where I'd promise to add some new feature in exchange for them
purchasing the app. Eventually I decided to open source it & move on to bigger
projects.

So basically my advice is start with consulting, so you're getting paid for
your time. Then if you happen to re-sell the code you wrote a second, third or
1,000x great... or if not, at least you were already paid once.

For example you found a client who wants a "todo app". Create a simple todo
app & then try to find more clients who want the same thing, over time build
it up to be the most sophisticated "todo app" on the market, with rules
engines or all sorts of bells & whistles & customization built in. Eventually
there will be no more market for hiring consultants to build "to do" apps,
instead the de factor market solution is your app. I feel this is a solid
strategy for creating a b2b startup company.

Lots of great programmers can create a CMS or a wordpress clone. But until you
consult for some real companies with real world problems & understand where
those systems fall short, you don't understand the market needs. Eventually
you get tired of hacking on permissions/access control to some open source CMS
as a consulting job, and you build your own CMS, or a plugin for that open
source CMS & [re]sell that to your clients instead.

