Twenty dollars in an envelope | Hacker News Reader

Twenty dollars in an envelope

justinjackson.ca

195 pointsmijustin89 comments

In my final year of University I decided to write some basic shareware that was helpful in creating your own custom theme for the recently-new Windows 95. After completing the app I put it out there to the shareware community.

I attached a note to the program asking for $20 if you liked it. I was very clear with the program though that there were no additional benefits to registering other than a clean karma. The program was fully functional from day 1 and payment though highly appreciated was not necessary. Being the poor student that I was I also offered a great incentive to people - instead of sending me $20 they could photocopy $20 and just send me the scan. Yes, being a 20something about to graduate encouraged me to ask for money but I was still too scared to jump in fully.

The crazy thing was that I started getting cheques from all over the world - and received some really cool scans of foreign currency that I hung on the walls as art. I even had the strange experience of receiving a note from somebody who lived in the apartment across from me who found the program and wanted to thank me (he was a student too so no money but having somebody at my University send me a thank you was even better than a cheque would have been).

I'm glad I wrote the software and put it out there. Even though I didn't make enough to retire I had finally realized that working for yourself can be intensely rewarding in many ways.

(I also learned a valuable lesson that even big companies can have problems writing cheques sometimes - I had one very well known software company send me some free games rather than a cheque.)

Surprised that the big companies had a hard time cutting cheques (normally, that's a non-issue). Maybe because your software was too "fun"?

Do you remember how many people ended up paying you?

It's a giant hassle to get a purchase order approved for software at many large companies.

I too, made my first sale as a shareware author on AOL, selling a Tetris clone for the Mac called Blox. I asked for $5 checks sent to my home address, and while I sold less than 100, the feeling of accomplishment and the incredibly nice notes included with those payments definitely kickstarted my entrepreneurial career and taught me to listen to my customers (hence Blox Arcade II released a year later for $10, sold via Kagi, and selling thousands of copies).

When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk.

There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too.

Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide.

The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.

From 2004-2009, I basically built things I could have charged for, but didn't. I was afraid to take money from people.

DHH (et al) to the rescue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

This is where the "Nice little Italian restaurant" SaaS meme was sourced from. He was hilariously spot-on.

I caved and started building things I would charge for. I'm still just part-timing it, but my stuff is growing. And, frankly, I'm not the best Rails/iOS/Java developer out there. Literally if I can do it, you can too.

Great, inspiring article.

So many people feel the same way. What was the scariest part about taking money from people?

In those days, two things:

1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers."

2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software.

So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point for me. #2 is an ongoing concern, and always will be.

Thanks for the question!

I think the fear of rejection is huge. I'm a pretty confident guy (I'll speak in front of crowds without too much trouble). But the idea of putting a price tag on something and asking people to pay for it is scary. The biggest fear: "What if no one buys it?"

I had a leg up to begin with. I started with an audience (of sorts) that I was able to poll to gauge interest. I didn't start building until literally 200 people told me they would buy it from me. Turns out most of them were blowing some kind of sunshine (or else they found another solution before I could launch one to meet their needs), and very few converted...

But, just the fact that they said yes to my product and price point gave me the confidence to start.

But, I think you can hijack someone else's product-confidence... by which I mean you should find a 800-pound gorilla competitor in your market and just follow them into battle, and eventually outflank them. Not gonna lie, I did this too, because I got to a place where my market-vision was limited... so I piggybacked on a competitors market vision. :)

"Pay what you think it's worth" might be a good way to mentally offset this? That way, you're not affixing a price to your work but instead just asking for a demonstration of what they value it at. It's probably a unilateral upside if the entirety of your payment process is 'post me a cheque if you feel it's worth it!', for the following reasons:

1) By not affixing a price to it, people will pay what they think it's worth. By affixing, say, $20, those who think it's worth less may not pay but those who think it's worth more won't pay more. There's a small risk that people may stretch to make your price tag but instead not bother but my completely untrained gut would say that'd be minimal?

2) You're already relying on people to go out of their way to send it based on goodwill. You're not going to lose customers simply by floating the amount they can choose to send.

3) Your conscience doesn't tell you 'hey, are you SURE this is worth $20? What if something breaks for someone? You forced them to pay $20 rather than $5, you owe them more than this!'. That's got to be liberating.

Of course, PWYW works mainly if it's a supplemental income and you're not relying on it to feed yourself :) That said, I'd expect it's pretty confidence-boosting to see someone voluntarily pay for something you made, since it basically says 'hey, I think you're worth this, thank you!'

The OP and this discussion is incredibly inspiring too, it makes me want to build and release stuff in my spare time that people are completely free to pay as little or as much as they want for, just to see what happens :)

Not to mention the fear of anger from free software advocates...

Surprisingly, yes, this is a thing, along with people who are anti-SEO. I speak as a convert from the church of anti-SEO, thanks to our mutual outspoken SaaS comrade in Japan.

I used to sell a small iOS app. For me, my biggest fear was not delivering value for the $2.99 someone paid me. It's dumb when I think about it logically because it's only $2.99, but I wanted anyone who paid to also be happy with their purchase. I will say though that people giving you money directly for something you built is a rush.

Among apps, $2.99 is quite high. The average price per app in the store is roughly $1.40, and the average selling price is likely less than 50 cents (I'm unsure, because reporting is only available for average overall price, not average sale price. However, logic dictates that, given that free apps are purchased with many times greater frequency than paid apps, the average sale price would be significantly lower than that average price.). Moreover, the median is free (due to the fact that ~90% of all apps are free.) So, because the price is inordinately high, there is undoubtedly a higher standard and more pressure to deliver value commensurate with the inflated price.

Great obserations.

Let us talk out of our asses here, just for a moment. People like to call these "thought experiments":

There are two mindsets at play that I can see. Lets call them the "analytical" and the "immediate"...

[Aside: If I use my own terms like this, then I can write that book later and have my movement-terminology ready-to-go ] :)

The "analytical" mindset is willing to spend thought-cycles worrying about the fact that an app is expensive at $2.99, since the price is anchored against a million other <$1.40 apps. The level of cognitive dissonance on display here is uncanny, but apparently price-anchoring is a low-level OS service of the human brain that is difficult to kill via the Task Manager (consciousness).

The "immediate" mindset is completely free of the cares of price anchoring. This usually happens when you're playing with other people's money, or when you simply don't have a choice.

If you build for the "immediate" mindset, you win.

Of course, this is just a thought experiment and completely indefensible. However, I am willing to make a bet that contains elements that are correct.

When I had a paid app in the app store price didn't seem matter too much.

I had a free version of the app with IAP and a paid version. Both initially cost $0.99 but after 6 months I raised the price to $1.99. Sales actually went up. I think if you have an app people like and you have good reviews, price isn't as important.

Graph for paid app https://www.dropbox.com/s/s7zvicfuan9ci5n/paid.png?m

Graph for IAP https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ddr15si5qp5bux/iap.png?m

Funny thing, your reviews also go up when you raise the price. I have 2 theories to explain this: - People who pay for something are more likely to research it before, and thus will only get the product if they think it fits their needs. On the other hand, if the app is free and it doesn't do what you thought it did, you might give it a bad review. - People who pay for things tell themselves that they're buying more quality, and so they truly see things differently.

This was a few years ago so things may have changed, but I played with pricing a lot. Eventually I found that sales were lower at .99 than $2.99. Above $2.99 they quickly fell off again. I assumed that a slightly higher price up to a point caused people to assign a higher perceived value.

As for a higher standard, I want to deliver value regardless of price. At the end of the day people are giving me something way more valuable than a couple dollars - their time.

Probably dealing with angry customers.

People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services.

"would pay", 5,200 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22would+pay%22+site:news.yc...

"wouldn't pay", 38,000 results

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wouldn%27t+pay%22+site:ne...

(OK, so it's kind of a joke response, but the abundance of free software and services has really driven down the expectations around reasonable payment compared to box software's heyday, even for software developers themselves).

Don't drink the kool aid. There is still a lot of money being made. You don't hear about it because only an idiot would talk about his/her amazing sales.

Hmmm. Only an "idiot" would talk about sales?

Patio11 - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-o...

Nathan Barry - http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/

Brennan Dunn - http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consulta...

Sad that I'm not "idiot" enough for you to mention! ;)

How could I forget about Amy! She's one of the first people I saw publish her numbers: http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products

A handful of people from thousands who prefer to keep quiet. Plus only those who do talk about them do it to help themselves (as a marketing tool). Any time you talk about amazing sales you risk alerting your competition about your niche.

Indeed.

I read all four of the blog posts. All four of them make the majority of their money from consulting or from training -- books, videos, and workshops -- rather than from products. The split ranges from around 50/50 to almost 90/10.

In 2012, Patrick made 20% of his income (not revenues) from products, and 80% of his income from consulting and training, primarily client engagements. (He did not disclose revenues from his second product -- but careful reading of his blog suggests that it probably has not quadrupled his product income.)

In 2010, Amy made 32% of her revenues from products, and 68% from consulting and training, primarily workshops. (The 68% has to be split 50/50 with her husband, but even after splitting it in half, it's still 48% vs 52% -- with the majority coming from consulting and training.)

In 2012, Nathan made 18% of his revenue from products, and 82% from consulting and training, primarily books.

In 2012, Brennan Dunn made 13% of his revenue from products, and 87% from training and consulting, primarily consulting. Interestingly, he took Amy's course and did a 180-degree reversal of direction.

They have all discovered that the money is not in gold mining -- or even in selling shovels to the gold miners. It's in giving presentations about gold-mining, and selling videos teaching them how to pan for gold. Patrick wrote about wrestling with his conscience before charging for his expertise, but ultimately discovered that it tripled his income. They have all turned their blogging popularity into cash -- and that's why they continue to blog.

The people who are making most of their money from gold-mining are not blogging about the location of their mine.

The people who are making most of their money from gold-mining are not blogging about the location of their mine.

Perfectly put.

But hey, I'm a consultant. I understand why, and how they do it. I'm not knocking on them, because they do provide value and are not scamming anyone.

Here's what I think is being missed in this discussion:

Product != Software

People buy software because they desire some intended outcome. For instance, I recently switched to Xero because emailing spreadsheets of categorizations back and forth to my accountant is messy and frustrating. And I might buy a book on bookkeeping because I suck at it. Or a course on cashflow because I never learned how to properly budget.

I think if you were to ask me, Patrick, Amy, Nathan, etc... if we see a huge difference between, say, a SaaS product we run and a workshop we teach, we wouldn't. The goal's the same: make someone better off than they were before.

It's really frustrating, but understandable on HN, to see people downplay products that aren't software. When writing Planscope, my goal was to help increase project transparency between consultants and their clients. After talking with many customres, I realized a large number of them needed help on something much more foundational to their business: how to price. So I built another product that helped people with that.

(Also, I honestly don't think that posting some — hopefully helpful — content on what I learned in trying to sell a book is going to result in "Double UR Freelancing Ratez" coming out and crushing my sales anytime soon.)

That's exactly my point. You've chosen to be in a business where blogging doesn't hurt you -- and in fact, it helps you.

As for giving non-software its due, that's a different discussion altogether. I was commenting on a post that talked about receiving $20 in the mail for shareware, on a thread that talked about the situation being tougher than in "box software's heyday."

"You've chosen to be in a business where blogging doesn't hurt you -- and in fact, it helps you."

How is this different than any other business?

Sure, what Brennan blogs about attracts his customers. But it can and no doubt will attract other people like him as well. What's stopping his competitors, or potential competitors, from copying what he's doing… of using his revenue posts as proof of market?

Then why doesn't everyone do it?

Why does Patrick reveal all of his financials, except for his second product? (Which, by the way, I think is a smart thing to do.)

Web 2.0 software-as-a-service is not helped too much by blog posts about how much money you're making. The site itself serves as promotion. A free trial is a much better way to promote your product than just a blog post. (Of course, you should do both.)

A training business is inherently more amenable to blogging as a form of promotion, vs., say, Google Adwords. Selling training requires that people trust what you have to say. The fact that you're making money convinces people that you are deserving of trust. Blogging is like a free trial -- it gives your customers a sample of what you can look forward to when they buy.

In Brennan's own words (speaking of his free newsletter):

http://planscope.io/blog/giving-up-a-million-dollar-consulta... "I’m cultivating an audience who trusts my opinion and has received a lot of value from me in the past. This makes, oh, selling a $1,199 workshop exponentially easier than if I were to run a paid AdWords campaign for the same workshop, which I daresay would be a fool’s error."

Patio11 doesn't reveal financials for AR because he's thinking about taking on investors for that project.

All four of them make the majority of their money from consulting or from training -- books, videos, and workshops -- rather than from products.

Do you think that a book or a video is not a product?

Of course, anything that you buy is a product in some sense. Services are also products. The maid you hire to clean your house is also a product. Healthcare is a product. And yes, education is also a product.

But this is a different topic than the one we were discussing.

The original article was about receiving $20 in the mail for shareware, "his first product." 37signals makes most of its money from a software product -- not a training product.

The thread I'm responding to began when someone complained that you cannot charge money anymore for products and services, because so much open source software is available and services (which I take to be software-as-a-service) is free. It's not someone complaining that books or videos don't sell anymore, because so much information is online for free.

Training is a profitable niche. But we can't all make 80% of our money training each other on how to do things.

A maid is not a product, she is a person. Her hourly rate is a service, because she is physically in your home cleaning for the time you pay her for. That is the definition of a service.

Unless you only buy books where the author comes to your house and delivers a dramatic reading…

… books are products. And so are videos.

I disagree with your percentage breakdown.

Brennan made $106,443 from his products, for 45% of his income. He could have dropped the consulting altogether and still would have made a nice six figure salary.

Nathan earned 76% of his income from his products.

Amy earned 100% of her income from products (as best I can tell).

Products are not the same as software. An ebook is no less a product than a paper book you buy in a store.

First:

Books, video courses, etc. aren't training OR consulting. You write once, and infinite people can buy them. A workshop is training but it's also a product because you only have to make it once, then you could present it yourself or easily have somebody else present your material, or turn it into a series of videos, etc., etc. Just because you are currently doing the work yourself doesn't mean that's the way it has to be.

As for your point about not "blogging about the location of their mine"…

As I have shared in many places, Freckle is grossing over $400k/yr now. Yep, a time tracking app. I "blog" (present, talk, podcast, etc) about this all the time. I give away my "secrets" (such as they are) repeatedly. I show people my revenue, and I teach about how I designed the software and how I market it. Of course the way we market it is plain to see considering the marketing is on the internet and I tweet it, link to it, talk about it, etc.

Surprise, surprise -- nobody has ever copied Freckle. Nor have any of our competitors copied even a single element of our innovative interface. Not even the really obvious stuff their customers need!

The fact is, you can tell people your "secrets" all day long and rest easy. Because the reason those people aren't rich isn't because they lack "secrets," it's because they lack discipline.

Finally, you claim that if people make money with training/workshops/videos/books, then we're just "giving presentations about gold-mining."

But 42% of our gross revenue in 2010 was from JavaScript workshops. Yep, programming workshops. About code. Amazingly, there were no pickaxes or sieves in sight.

I understand that you're angry. Whatever it was you signed up for, in the hopes of striking it rich (or at least highly comfortable), it had to do with shiny software and not boring old ebooks or video classes on how to effectively onboard new customers. What we do isn't sexy. But the fact is, unless you can help people, you're not going to be able to make sales. Help can come in any form, even as software, as long as it works for the customer. If your products (yes, products) don't help people, though, you're sunk… and sexiness won't help you.

Not sure I understand that logic.

If you are selling to a niche, then by definition your competition is also. If you mean a narrower niche than you and your competition already share, then it's very unlikely that they also don't know about it or won't soon regardless of you talking about it.

The only way this statement seems true is for a very loose definition of "competition." But I would love to be shown I'm wrong.

You don't talk about how profitable a given niche is to you because then your competition will just outright copy, and or do negative things to you. Its like walking inside a cage of sleeping bears. You don't want to wake them up.

If this worries you: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-comp...

Those 38K people are irrelevant if the 5200 are paying you enough to live on.

Your mission in life is not to make everyone happy. This is impossible anyway. (and yeah, I know you are being half-serious)

I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

I don't know about selling, but I had a hobby project, my first in Pascal, that would translate ProBoard (ProBBS, or a PcBoard door program that did fancy things) to and from RBBS (the other open source board software). I uploaded it to a couple of boards, some of which were FidoNet connected. Anyway, a few months later got a call I think from someone somewhere in the Navy that wanted to use it, and asked if I had any improvements planned. I didn't as I had already moved on to other things (probably Lemmings), but let them know they were free to use it as they see fit. As an 8 or 9 year old kid, I was amazed at the reach of technology, so it was very encouraging, and helped me to pursue a career in IT.

Whoa! You were 8 or 9?

I ran a little ProBoard BBS for awhile. ;)

well, maybe 10 or 11 now that i think back and do some googling around dates and such, but i know by like 12 or 13 i was more into guitar for a while

I used to compile a bunch of tech-product-related coupons and discount codes and tricks for saving money on buying the hot stuff of the day (RAM, DVD-ROM drives, etc) and sell that as a report on eBay.

I always wondered about those. Did they make any money?

I sure made some pocket money and got a job offer (editorial position) from a deal web site, which they unfortunately rescinded when one of my references foolishly mentioned how old I was.

I more or less paid for my computers selling a shareware¹ calendar program for Macs. It just let you make a one page calendar² of a month and type things in the days with some simple styling.

I initially wrote it as a birthday present for my brother, who needed something to do that job, then decided maybe some other people would like it. It was popular with teachers. (Writing that I feel like a jurassic patio11!)

I think it was $10, then I raised it to $15. These were pre-internet days, pre AOL even. It was fun getting checks from foreign lands, though it annoyed my bank. They eventually started charging $20 to clear a foreign check, so I had to adopt an unofficial “foreign folk get registered for free” policy and just thank them and tear up their checks when they arrived. I think the last check came in over 10 years after I stopped maintaining the program.

␄

¹ Slightly nag ware. Registered users could make the solicitation screen stop showing up on launch. There was a secret little click dance you could do on the solicitation screen to prove you were registered.

² Pro tip: A “calender” passes the spelling checker, but is a machine in which cloth or paper is pressed between rolls until smooth. You will have to update your software and reprint your paper manuals when you discover this fact.

Bonus Pro Tip: If you try to write a direct SCSI access disk utility, you may accidentally corrupt your only hard drive, not have backups of your source code, and then get to write a block scanner using only floppy based tools to scan the wreckage of your hard drive looking for blocks that might be C source code, collect those together, and reassemble your software sources as best you can. That's ok, version 2.0 is always better anyway, and you will have learned to keep backups.

So perhaps not much of a story, but the Amiga came out and the first (for me) compelling "dungeon crawler" game on it was Dungeon Master. I spent a lot of time on it, and as was my custom, kept notes in my notebook. Pretty soon I had a pretty complete set of maps for the place, which a friend of mine wanted a copy of. So I made copies of the pages of my notes but they were hard to interpret (except for me!) and disorganized, so I opened up Deluxe Paint and just drew them (they were all 32 x 32 squares I believe) anyway, the drawing lead me to go in and check things, and I went back and looked for every single secret room etc, and end the end had a complete set. So I printed them out and gave them to my friend, who offered to pay me $5 for them.

I wondered if anyone else would want them, and so I offered them up, a copy for anyone for $5. Sold a couple hundred copies. And to top it off, a German company that made 'player guides' bought a copy, decided they wanted to use it in one of their guides and offered me $50 for the "rights" to do that, and I gladly accepted.

That ended up funding my purchase of a lot of games for the Amiga.

I love this story! How old were you at the time? How did you "offer it up for others to buy?"

Hmm, lets see the Amiga came out in '84 so I was in my mid-twenties. I originally posted availability on comp.sys.amiga as I recall. That spread to a couple of Compuserve forums and to BIX[1]

[1] The BYTE Information eXchange which was a funny funny bulletin board running on a VAX.

Edit: Apparently still valid in 1989 :-) https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/rec.games.... although that isn't my address any more.

As an exercise in Windows programming I made a little alarm clock program called SuperAlarm that would use Winamp to play MP3s. I put in the readme that I liked Skittles and postcards; I got a number of postcards and one day I got a 1-pound bag of Skittles from someone in Canada. I still remember how great that felt even 15+ years later.

Haha, I found a screenshot of the app: http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/SuperAlarm-Screensh...

Ha ha. That's awesome: a bag of Skittles from Canada! (as a Canadian, I appreciate this).

Question: why did you decide not to put a price on it?

It was probably a combination of not thinking it was worth actual money (it was the first time I'd made anything for Windows), and my early Linux era free software mindset.

We did fairly well.

http://books.google.com/books?id=mi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA29&#...

Good times...

Coming from a somewhat different viewpoint other than as a developer, I spent 10 years working as a full-time reviewer for one of the largest shareware disk vendors, Public Brand Software, and then later for Ziff when they bought PBS. (In fact, my first day at PBS was also the day Ziff took over the company...)

There was a lot of money being made from shareware in the 80s and 90s. I was involved in the Summer Shareware Seminars (later rebranded Shareware Industry Awards) and got to talk to quite a few developers/authors who were making mid-6 figure incomes from shareware, and of course there were a handful that had made their million(s). They were pretty aggressive marketers, though, and not the kind who just wrote a program, distributed it through the BBS ecosystem, and waited to see what would happen.

Disk vendors could make a considerable amount of money, as well. PBS was no Mom-and-Pop affair. Thinking back on it, there were 25-30 full-time employees (office staff, order takers, tech support, reviewers, catalog editors, in-house disk duplicating staff, 20+ line BBS, etc.) I have no idea what type of revenue the company generated, but it was a bustling place!

In high school I wrote a turn based strategy game (think "Empire" with resources, like a very very basic "Civilization") and sent it off to a shareware publisher. The Internet and self-distribution wasn't invented back then.

I was pretty disappointed when I received the rejection letter.

I had two wildly (for me anyway) successful Windows shareware apps in the '80s & '90s. WinPrint[1] and INIedit[2].

They were $25 a pop and I made way more than $10K from them over the years. Each payment (except a few juicy site licenses) came to me as a check in an envelope.

The best part was WinPrint became my resume for Microsoft. It demonstrated that I was an expert in an area where demand was high: Apps on Windows that could actually print.

[1] http://www.kindel.com/products/winprint/ [2] http://www.kindel.com/products/iniedit/

This blast from the past made me poke around some old code. My first shareware app was called TAPES I wrote in high-school. It was a UCSD P-System (Pascal) app that printed J-Cards for cassette tapes (the cards that list what songs are on the tapes; you insert them into the cassette case...for you little kids who never used cassettes). Given how few people on CompuServe had access to UCSD P-System, I don't think I sold very many copies :-)

I eventually released TAPES using Turbo Pascal for the PC as well.[1]

Printing has always been my thing. Another app I built, that was freeware, was called Spit. Spit printed your source code with headers/footers...originally WinPrint was called WinSpit... I'm super embarrassed by my rebellion against K&R the source demonstrates [2].

[1] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/MY_PAS/TAP... [2] https://github.com/tig/Tigger/blob/master/College/C_SRC/SPIT...

In the late 90's, I began selling several command-line programs for Windows using the shareware model. I sold a command-line SMTP mailer (MailSend), a command-line POP3 reader (MailGrab), a command-line scheduler (TSched), and a command-line Dial-up-networking disconnect utility (HangUp).

Total income over several years was in the low five-figures when bundling deals were included ( some people wanted to include these programs as part of bigger systems that they sold ). I created a successor to MailSend called MailWrench that provided better support for Microsoft Exchange Server and SMTPS (SMTP over SSL), but the market just didn't seem to be there for command-line mailers any longer.

These programs are now free-to-run software with source ( with the exception of MailGrab).

Yup. I wrote AutoCAD add-ons. Public domain and some shareware. The "big money" was in site licenses. Architects wouldn't pay for anything. But anyone doing work for the government was serious about making sure they had licenses for everything.

Promotion and distribution were major challenges. You'd upload your wares to CompuServe, BBSes, etc. I'd also visit conventions and tour user groups. I never felt the need for classified ads (not targeted enough).

The real shareware players had their own BBSs. I went a bit further and started a network of CAD/CAM, computer graphics themed BBSs and served as the hub. Much like FidoNet. It was huge fun, but a lot of work.

Someone else noted that majority of income came from consulting/contracting and some writing. That was my experience too. I had the view "your work is your resume" and publishing shareware was the best way to get known. Much like working on some open source projects today.

I gave away and eventually sold snippets of front end web tools (example code mostly) shortly after picking up basic JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills as a pre-teen in the late 90's.

My first product was a "login" script (just JavaScript which generated an encoded version of a username and password and navigated to that URL). I remember when I received my first envelope with a $10 check and an email address inside. That was an awesome feeling.

I also made a fairly complicated "calendar creator" script which allowed a user to stylize and customize a calendar template that would be output in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were the only tools I knew how to use that's naturally what I wrote the program using. Everything was output in a textarea field for "easy" copy-pasting into the user's website.

After a few years I realized the programs were becoming dated (I started receiving more frequent refund requests) and I stopped charging and open sourced them.

In hindsight, the programs were fairly poorly written but I'm glad to know that at least a couple dozen people found them useful.

I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive.

To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway.

But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work.

It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.

While the story is lovely, it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen.

Also, this is another "right time right place" story - his code wasn't just good, it was one of the few solutions at the time. Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same.

Forget bad things - it's quaint to think of the days where asking someone nicely to pay you if they like your product actually worked, to the tune of 5-figures.

Nowadays you'd just get some kids on the internet explaining how them using your product for free is doing you a favor, "exposure" and the such.

> "Had he tried to do it a few years after that, I doubt the results would have been the same."

Isn't that besides the point? The point seems to be that there is always an ache that needs to be filled - often not needing a great deal of technical ability, just product insight.

If he came around a few years later, there'd be just as many things computer users wanted solved.

Let me introduce you to Amanda Palmer - The Art of Asking: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.htm...

She got money to the tune of 6-figures by asking people to buy her music if they liked it.

Honestly, I doubt that much has changed except that there are more kids online. It's always been the adults who primarily paid for stuff. Even back then, there were probably lots of kids who used his software for free.

Take home message: if you want to build consumer products and make money, target adults, not teenagers.

I'd argue there are WAY more adults online now as a percentage of overall internet users now, than 15 years ago.

Back in 1999 when I first started using AOL, adults would always ask young people for help. Most adults didn't see the value in it, and kids didn't need to see the value in it. The result was a very young population of people using the internet.

Most people over the age of 50, even after 15 years are still so far behind people 30 an younger.

I'm not sure. I know some niche's are pretty well covered with offerings, but I'm always surprised at how bad products can be once you wander a little off the reservation, like a music organization app. I bet if you looked into that space right now you'd find that there's still some room available for something creative.

Maybe you are right, but in the "business to business" world it is still as the old times, businesses are going to pay $20 per month if you provide some real value.

> it's also quaint to think of the days when a young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen.

Why would bad things happen due to that? Are there roving gangs of thieves desperately searching the internet for the addresses of people to rob?

I really doubt things have much in this regard, and one likely could do this just as easily (and with the same relative safety) as in the past. OTOH, it tends to be far less useful/necessary now.

Indeed, I've found that worrying about your "real persona" on the internet to pretty much not be worth it. Since I was about 15 I have started doing everything using my real name, as well as having my address and phone number highly available.

Not to mention that most childhood sexual assaults are perpetrated by blood relatives.

>"Also, this is another "right time right place" story - his code wasn't just good, it was one of the few solutions at the time."

This "right time" exists always and forever, in history and the future. There will never be a lack of problems to solve for money. In hindsight, it's all easy and obvious.

>young kid put his home address on the internet and bad things didn't happen

Almost all types of crime are down. Crimes towards a kid (if people even knew that) included.

The news has made you afraid. There is nothing to worry about that they tell you to worry about.

"The only thing we have to fear except fear itself"

There are problems in the world: the vast majority are avoidable with some care and a bit of thought.

Assuming he didn't say he was a kid in the text file, how would this be inviting crime in any way, even now? And even if he did say he was a kid, it's not as if giving out his address is making him much of a target. If a criminal wants to find some kids, finding a house with kids playing in the front yard is easier than tracking down an address from some shareware app.

I literally sold dozen of games in diskettes back in the '90. I cannot say how much money I've made, but certainly, a lot to buy a 50cc. motorcycle and a pro BMX. Ah… those days! And also, I re-traded lot of shareware. I bought them from the magazines and sold the copies for the same price…

I sold my paintbox for £12 in 1988. It ran on a BBC Archimedes 310 in the shop window of the computer store where I bought it doing abstract expressionist artwork to show off its various calligraphic and airbrush tools in full colour.

To put this in perspective Photoshop 1.0 was available back then, ran on a more expensive Macintosh and was black & white.

I sold 4 copies and the shop took a cut.

Jason Fried is so cool, he knew how terrible Filemaker Pro was before it existed! (Alright… it was probably 1990 already. Just had to point out the potential anachronism of 25 years ago being 1988 and Filemaker Pro being released in October 1990.)

Ha ha. Either the dates are a little hazy, or he was actually using FileMaker Plus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker#History

Here's the earliest record I could find for AudioFile (1997): http://web.archive.org/web/19971221191641/http://spinfree.co...

my first experience was writing a call back verification program for WWIV BBS systems. I do not recall how much I made, but it was a substantial amount. I think it was named CBVWWIV, I forget as the code is long lost. It was written in Turbo Pascal and supported ASCII, ANSI, and AVATAR, output.

That was an interesting time to be involved in and at times I think it was more fun and entertaining that the net today.

The best piece of advice he actually gives it build something you would use yourself (and would pay for it).

Great interview. I assume the transcriber isn't a programmer: "database" and "readme" are pretty canonical programming terms.

OP here. I use a 3rd party transcribing service (so they're definitely not programmers).

When I was a kid, I mailed $5 to the address listed on a shareware disk, to get an unlock code for the full program. Never got a response.

I think that was last time I fell for the rebranding-resale scam.

Do you remember which program it was?

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