Ask HN: Should I even bother trying to sell to universities? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I even bother trying to sell to universities?

5 pointswestoncb6 comments

I’ve been working on a piece of software (https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY) which is a probably too general to be a product as it is at the moment. Instead, it could be specialized in different ways to make different products—but I would like to focus on just one of these initially.

The potential products I’m trying to decide between are: (1) A multi-language ‘object monitoring’ utility kind of like Chrome’s object explorer with certain enhancements (2) An easy to use, and very flexible instructional algorithm visualization system (3) A ‘high-level’ algorithm debugger.

I believe (1) has the greatest profit potential, and fewer complexities on the business side—but will take more work than the others code-wise, and I’m about out of money and need to get a job soon.

(2) wouldn’t take much more work to have an alpha in order—but then I have to try selling to universities! I have no experience with this sort of thing at all. I’m unsure whether the profit potential is reasonable (i.e. whether they typically even have much money to spend; is it like Enterprise sales?), how rigid they are about adopting new software, whether they would even speak with me, or how I would initiate contact, etc.

I would use (3) personally, and it’s the reason I started the project, but after sharing the idea with a bunch of other programmers, I can’t see it catching on any time soon.

Any comments on which direction seems best are welcome, but I am particularly curious about what to expect if I were to follow the selling to universities route. Thanks!

Whom at universities do you wish to sell to? Who do you see using this?

I work as a math professor at a state university, and overall universities don't seem like good places to work as programmers. Most of the programming-ish work seems to consist of making big pieces of software (PeopleSoft, Blackboard, etc.) work. I don't know how much actual programming this involves; I'd be a bit surprised if there was a market for your product there, but I could be wrong.

Perhaps you instead envisioned working with individual CS professors or departments? There your prospects are probably better; if you persuade someone there that your software is worth buying, they might well be willing to buy at a couple thousand dollars. They have their own (smaller) pots of money which they control and would not need to fool around with much bureaucracy to buy.

The disadvantage is that it would be hard to get your foot in the door. Contact information for professors is easy to find, which means that people are constantly contacting them with all sorts of unsolicited requests, and their fingers are used to finding the `D' key quite rapidly. If you somehow got a couple of individual, influential CS professors to use and love their product, they might recommend it to their peers. This could be difficult though ... for example, in six years of working as a math professor I have not yet purchased any software, although I could if I wanted to.

There are smart people in academia, doing interesting and worthwhile things -- but I expect that it would be an exasperating market to sell to. Good luck if you try!

> Whom at universities do you wish to sell to? Who do you see using this?

I see it being used as a pedagogical aid for professors. I've run into some research demonstrating the efficacy of these kinds of visualizations for CS education, but their conclusion was that they are too expensive to produce. I make them cheaper by providing a general purpose platform for algorithm visualization, where you get visualizations just by writing the code like you normally do.

> but I expect that it would be an exasperating market to sell to.

That's kinda what I was thinking :/ I'll try to get some more data since this post didn't really take off—but it looks like I'll probably try a different direction to begin with...

Thanks for the info.!

> I see it being used as a pedagogical aid for professors.

This is, unfortunately, likely to be difficult.

The pots of money that professors typically have at their discretion is usually for research, and comes from grant funding (e.g. the National Science Foundation). Although most professors do care about teaching, they aren't likely to spend much in this instance.

Wish it weren't so, but that's how the incentives typically line up. I hope I'm wrong!

Can we have more details on (3)? Sounds like something I'd use for sure from the video/high level description...

Actually, I have another video and more written description on it here: http://westoncb.com/projects/avd

That material is quite a bit older, but that's when I was focusing more on (3), so hopefully it clarifies things.

The main idea though is: when you're inventing a new algorithm to do something, you're typically thinking in terms of operations on data structures, rather than something lower level like lines of code in a particular language. So, if you use this tool while attempting to write your new algorithm, it will give you a visualization of what your code is actually doing to the data structures involved, versus what you thought it was doing.

Awesome stuff

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