Making Money Online by Writing Software
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 10 May 2008 | Tagged as: General
I’ve been told that a software business is 1/4 programming and 3/4 marketing. It takes more than being a good software developer to build a successful business. You need a good web site to promote and support your products. You need to understand marketing, basic bookkeeping, and many other business skills.
I remember reading about a Facebook developer in Vancouver who was getting about 25,000 page views per day on his web site and only making $5 each day. By his own admission, he lacks marketing and business skills. If he knew about the benefits of Google Adsense, he could have been making about $2200 per month by placing these ads on his site.
The Problem with Programmers
Most programmers spend their time reading technical books related to their profession 
and not enough time reading business and marketing books. While developing good software is important, being able to deliver them to customers is just as important if not more so.
One of the reasons I think that many software projects go open source is because the developers lack the business skills to successfully market their product. A good example of this is DotNetNuke. This started out as a commercial product but didn’t make much progress, so then it became open source. There are currently 500,000 registered users on their web site. This could have been a half a million paying users if the product was marketed correctly. ASP.NET users typically typically pay for software due to the lack of free counterparts.
As before, I welcome praises and criticisms for anything I post here.
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2 Comments »
on 10 May 2008 at 5:58 pm 1.Robert MacEwan said …
Just look at the success of Microsoft. Business/Marketing, not coding, skills made this company successful.
on 13 May 2008 at 2:09 am 2.Johan Cyprich said …
They also have the money to buy companies that develop great products and then integrate with other Microsoft products. Knowing which companies to buy and being able to use what they’ve created is also a very useful ability that Microsoft has.