

Ask HN: Are you working on a desktop software? - rokhayakebe

What is  your experience with distribution, sales of desktop applications.
======
utnick
I made a shareware app once that received a grand total of 1 sale lol, but it
was an interesting learning experience.

\- I used e-junkie.com for sales and distribution, it works really well, plugs
in with paypal and automates everything

\- I offered a 4 day demo trial, 1 in 300 people that downloaded the demo went
on to purchase, although my product wasnt very good the numbers for others ive
read are still very low.. tons of people just download apps just to try with
no real intention of buying, this makes adwords advertising hard to make
economical unless you convert REALLY well or price really high

\- download sites never sent me very much traffic, but I was in a very crowded
niche ( typing teacher programs )

\- if you are developing for msft, make sure you test your program an various
versions of windows.

\- Really polish your software, I made the mistake of throwing something that
wasn't very good out there. Your software has to be VERY GOOD to get people to
pull out their credit cards. You really need to be the best in your niche. You
cant think that 'oh photoshop makes 100 million a year, I just need to make a
photoshop clone that has 1% of the features and is 1% as good, then I'll be a
millionaire' It doesn't work like that.

------
old-gregg
Our last big desktop project was free, so I can't comment on anything
regarding sales, but distribution was a pain in the ass because it was a
Windows product.

About 20% of those who downloaded were not able to install it due to the
following reasons:

* Could not find "where did it go?" after downloading (not joking)

* Were running some kind of "security suite" which was crippling our installer or didn't let our product connect to the internet and users couldn't figure out which program performed the function of a firewall, let alone configure it.

* Their computers were heavily modified by other installed Windows software (non-standard DLLs in /windows/system), missing/modified registry entries, rootkits+spyware+malware+adware. Windows allows this kind of thing.

Technically the product was nothing fancy, an Internet Explorer plugin, but it
surely knows how it feels to be a domesticated cat dropped from a comfy
helicopter into amazonian jungle. [dev. machine -> an average user's machine]

I spent most of my career developing Windows libraries for other developers
(ActiveX controls, signal processing, industrial automation, that kind of
thing) and never faced a "6-pack Joe" as a customer. Once I've tried, I got
rid of all my Windows computers, forced myself to open a whole new UNIX world
and yes, switched to mostly Web development, which I find ___extremely_
__trivial and boring (HTMLization of DB schemas), but I'm glad I don't have to
deal with "Where did it go?" anymore.

~~~
russell
Use an installer like InstallShield. (There may be free or cheaper
alternatives, but I haven't looked in a long time.) The installer takes care
of housekeeping pains that will trip you up, like registry differences between
XP and Vista, or cross platform installations.

~~~
haasted
AFAIR InstallShield is rather expensive, so it may be tempting to consider
some free alternatives such as

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (<http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page>)
Windows Installer XML toolset (<http://wix.sourceforge.net/>)

------
hbien
I make an app for the Mac which is doing pretty decent. Not enough to replace
a full time job, but almost enough to cover rent.

* For distribution, I just have a website. I also put it up on the Apple downloads listing, which is where most of my traffic comes from.

* A bunch of other sites pull data from Apple's listings, so I get traffic from there too.

* More updates = more traffic = more sales, because each update gets you near the top of the download sites

* Sales are done through PayPal, which is really easy to setup

* Support email isn't bad at all, maybe 1 email every other day

* The free trial limits the amount of data you can enter, rather than a time trial. That way users can try out future updates too.

* When a major site did a post about it, sales AND feature request emails spiked. But after a week, it goes back to normal.

~~~
tstegart
How do you do downloads? Do you wait for payment to clear in paypal and send
them a link, or provide a download right away? Or is the download the usual
free app and payment gets them the key?

~~~
patio11
I do free trial automatically becomes full version with presence of key. In
most markets, I would send out keys IMMEDIATELY on payment -- the risk of
fraud is insubstantial (most people won't try to cheat you and the ones that
will, oh well, all you lose is a few server cycles generating a new key) but
the immediacy of instant delivery helps lift conversion rates substantially.

(I got +5% sales when I stopped calling my purchase option "Purchase a single
copy via download" and instead said "Get it instantly via download". Love that
word "instant".)

Some of my friends, who are more worried about fraud than I am, do instant
delivery of temporary keys and then provide the permanent key after a few
days. I resist doing this largely because it causes a hassle to my customers
without gaining them any extra benefits. (Plus, key management is already a
major source of tech support headaches, why double the load?)

------
andrewf
I'm not but I have in the past - downloadable with a time-limited trial, and
also available in boxed form via mail order and some distributors.

The biggest difference I've noted since moving to the web is that on the
desktop (Windows at least), you _need_ beta testers.

Your users are more distant and therefore disengaged (they got your app from
download.com and have no idea how to contact you), older versions of your app
will float around forever, and user's systems are varied enough that you can
never do adequate testing inhouse.

Pay attention to those users that do contact you, because for every one of
them there's several that had the same issue with your trial version and
walked away. At the same time, learn to recognise unique problems and fucked
up Windows machines and walk away - they're just time sinks.

Entice people with screenshots and a sales pitch, then make download and
installation as painless as possible. Try and keep the installer size down.
Definitely avoid making people download and install any sort of runtime
environment separately.

Tying registration codes to identity (regcode = hmac_sha256(secret +
emailaddress)) will cut down on regcode sharing a bit during your early days,
but keygens and cracked versions will eventually appear. There are a few
turnkey anti-piracy / activation / etc solutions about these days, I never
evaluated them.

A retail version with a CD, box and a little printed manual will appeal to
lots of people who wouldn't go for a download. Some may not have internet
access at home, and most won't upgrade. Make your retail version once that's
proven itself as a download for as long as is feasible :)

------
inovica
Hi there

Most of the discussion on here is about web-based apps. We create both web and
desktop based software. One of our products (SourceGuardian.com) provides
encryption for PHP source code. Our experience was to create something that we
wanted to use ourselves, as the competition at the time was charging $6000 a
license, and then we turned that into a product. We have created several other
applications and are working on some backup software which links with Amazon
EC2/S3 and is due for launch in Jan 2009. For this, and for the other software
under this brand we'll be looking primarily at a reseller model. Finally we
are also working on hybrid apps, that take the power of the
internet/servers/cloud and use that for processing, bringing the data back to
a desktop app/widget as well as iphone. The latest one is competitive
intelligence online and my own feeling is that desktop apps still have the
edge for usability right now. Why not tell us what you're working on and I'm
sure some people on here will provide you with help in terms of what you are
looking for.

------
huhtenberg
I'll save myself some re-typing if you don't mind -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=322929>

(edit) actually that whole discussion is relevant -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=322630>

------
patio11
That's my business. I also blog about lots of related topics.

Business: <http://www.bingocardcreator.com> Blog: <http://www.kalzumeus.com>

Just hit $20k in revenue this year _does a little happy dance_.

Distribution: Website. I get people to the website by mostly SEO and AdWords,
with an increasing word of mouth contribution (more than a thousand paying
customers means that, increasingly, you hear "Oh, I was looking for JUST THIS
and then Myrtle at church told me...").

Sales: Web site? See blog for copious tips on the use of payment processors (I
use <http://www.e-junkie.com> as a wrapper around Paypal/Google Checkout) and
how to write sales copy.

Download sites: Nearly worthless for PC software.

------
tom_rath
For here: Networked desktop software for businesses sold at a per-user charge.
Distribution is direct download through the Internet and sales are quite
spiffy, thanks.

You can sometimes live on eyeballs with a web app but, in desktop land, you
need to make something people are willing to pay cash for. If you get to that
point, you're golden.

------
dhimes
I write desktop apps with Java Swing. It's wrapped into a .exe with its own
icon. I "sell" it as a download from Yahoo store. Buyers can optionally log
into the web site and get free upgrades.

I like distributing with Java because I want schools to use the app, and when
I give it to teachers to try they don't have to have special permission to
install it. As long as java has been cleared for their computer, installing my
app is as easy as using a .pdf file.

The sales just aren't there, though. (Many have downloaded the demo version,
which (a) is good enough or, more likely (b) convinces them the app is not for
them. Dang.

I will launch a complementary product in Jan 2009, which will hopefully
provide a synergistic lift to the whole effort!

~~~
sherl0ck
what's the tools do you use for wrapping main class with exe? should the user
also download java?

~~~
dhimes
I use launch4j <http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/>

You can handle java installation two ways: 1). you can bundle it on a disk,
and launch4j will install it [but this defeats the advantage of a java app not
needing IT dept approval]; or 2). the user will be directed to Sun's java
download page if the appropriate version is not installed. You can specify
both an earliest usable version and a latest usable version with launch4j. So
if 1.6 broke something, you can specify 1.5 as the latest they can use.

------
Flemlord
I'm working on desktop software for a financial services vertical. Data
consolidation is one of the problems we're addressing and web apps have too
many limitations for us to build a good data management tool. We're using an
SOA layer so the app should work well for remote users. Think iTunes.

We're using WPF and this is the operations tool which will eventually be
complemented by a browser app. It's our hope that we'll be able to force
enough of the WPF code into Silverlight to make it the front-end for the
browser app. We're also going to try using WPF in the browser but I think the
installation headaches will be too much for us.

------
brl
We just released a second beta of our application which is a network security
tool platform. Our distribution strategy is to release everything for free as
open source and hope that people like it enough to tell other people about it.
At the moment we're still not sure what we're going to sell.

I should probably make my own thread about this, but if anybody wants to check
it out it's available here: <http://netifera.com/downloads/>

~~~
corentin
1\. Build a great product

2\. Give it away for free

3\. ???

4\. Profit!

Are you sure you can't merge 2 and 3 into something more... _sensible_?

~~~
brl
I guess we're not as skeptical about this underwear-gnome business plan as you
are. We don't know for sure what #3 is going to be and I don't think we have
enough information yet to decide.

It's not just a product (or a product at all, since we aren't selling it).
It's also a framework and what we are really concerned with building is the
community around it. That's where our priorities are at the moment.

------
jamesbritt
My company, Happy Camper Studios, has just released JotBot:
<http://www.getjotbot.com>

It a cross-platform desktop-based time-tracking application.

We used JRuby + Swing plus Monkeybars. It needs a license key to run; we have
a Web service handling that to generate 30-day trial keys or fully-registered
non-expiring keys. That's handled by Ramaze on Glassfish.

Sales are done through Shopify and Google Checkout.

------
sgman
I write iPhone native apps. Does that count?

~~~
st3fan
How are your sales?

------
sanj
only as an adjunct to the web product.

