I found this comment interesting. I haven’t had any success, not for lack of trying, but it seems like most advice I’ve heard is that technical users are hard to sell to.
a) They think they could do it themself in a weekend. Even though it took you 5 person years of work.
b) They are used to using lot of free and opensource software and don't expect to pay for software.
Other technical users (chemical engineers, civil engineers etc) are probably easier to sell to. But I don't have any data to back that up.
I think it is often true that 1) a talented programmer 2) can solve their own specific use case 3) in a janky way that is only usable to them, in a weekend.
That’s very far off from a product, but is enough for the programmer to not become a customer.
Analysis was that the engrossing and engaging activity of coding directly warped the time-sense of the coder, as a regular phenomenon.
As an aside another test at that time was comparing the production results of someone using a mouse-driven interface versus someone using a keyboard only. The keyboard-only users repeatedly claimed to be faster than any mouse-user, but the timed tests were the opposite, by a large margin.
Unfortunately he had anger issues at the time, so it was a constant cycle of “do this thing, your taking too long, I’m adult throwing a rage tantrum at kids, repeat”.
c) They don't trust that the tool will be around for a long time
When they need software for something, they would google it and use the top results. Those folks are very very difficult to reach as an indie developer.
In my case, if someone google's "how to create a blog", there's literally no chance anything I do as an indie will put me in the top 5 results. Just one example of course, usual caveats and exceptions etc etc ...