

Ask HN: $3.4M / year on shareware - even remotely possible? - bryanlee9

Hi, I'm new to this site so apologies if I'm not posting to the right place or the right way.<p>I saw a discussion about shareware which led me to this article:
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people-register-shareware.html<p>which is quite old (1990's), but still something in there caught my attention.  This person claims that he spent two days to develop a product (saying it wasn't "a significant investment" of his time) and it generated some $34K in a year.  So I was thinking, well if he develops a product like this every two days, in a year he could have 100 of these, even if he only worked weekdays.<p>Unless I'm missing something, that would be $3.4M for a year's worth of work!<p>I realize times may have changed a bit, but don't those numbers seem to be completely in the realm of fantasy?  Did that person get really lucky or is he some sort of marketing genius?<p>Thanks!
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chrismeyer_
The whole logic is flawed for these reasons :

1) He was able to build a product that sold for 34k bucks in a year in 1990,
at that time the software market wasn't nearly as saturated as it is today. 2)
It won't simply be possible today, with the number of freewares, opensource
projects,piracy,warez, etc., available to do any kind of task. 3) Therefore it
is much more harder to find products to develop that would find and hit
successfully a real shareware market

As a personal note, i suggest you to focus on the mobile market apps,
especially for iphone and android, that will become huge. That's my 2 cents.
But i would bet two hundred bucks that i am not wrong with this prediction.

