Ask HN: From a free product to a commercial product

[sorchr]

Greetings,

Nearly one year ago I released a free .NET profiler [1]. I started coding it to solve a unique problem; a problem none of the available profilers could help me with. It was a fun experience and a much needed break from the day-to-day business of shuffling data between a UI and a db. Due to this joyous experience I created a generic profiler in my spare time and, as previously stated, released a public free version - mostly just for the fun of it.

I focused almost entirely on coding features that were interesting to do, but not all that useful in terms of profiling features or problem solving. A few months ago I started thinking how much fun it would be to get paid for doing this kind of programming and started to focus on making the profiler more useful. The ultimate goal is of course to turn it into a mISV and eventually make a living of it.

So do any of you have any experience in re-launching a free software development tool as a commercial one – or know of any tales in that category?

I am currently thinking of giving the software a new name and a new site (name and site already known and registered) and sort of start from scratch. The current versions will continue to work, but will not be updated.

Marketing seems to be the major factor of success – it is also the area where I have the least experience. Besides the ambiguous advice of creating a blog, what other marketing areas do people have good experiences with? I have already used Google AdWords a bit and made one comment about the profiler on a MS MVP's blog – so far the profiler usage is in the very modest range [2] - probably due to the lack of marketing and lack of useful features.

I would love to hear tales of the yields of investing a significant amount of cash in the marketing effort of development tools (magazines, conference stands and similar), compared to just let it grow more organically (with a modest AdWords budget) - and of course any other advice people might have.

Thanks!

[1]: http://www.xteprofiler.com [2]: http://www.xteprofiler.com/stats/ (requires Silverlight 4)

[michael_dorfman]

So do any of you have any experience in re-launching a free software development tool as a commercial one – or know of any tales in that category?

.NET Reflector, developed as a free tool by Lutz Roeder, and taken commercial by Red-Gate would be a nice object lesson.

[sorchr → michael_dorfman]

True - but don't you think the negativity surrounding this would have been a lot less, had Lutz himself decided to make it a commercial product?

[michael_dorfman → sorchr]

I don't know; it seems to me that there are a lot of programmers who seem to be opposed on principle to paying for software (which is a kind of strange position, seeing as most of them are also trying to make a living developing software.)