Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals (2003)

sodaware.net

38 pointsTomte14 comments

While the article has a point on the differences which makes success or not in shareware the phrase

Ask empowering questions like, "How can I increase sales by 20% or more?"

sounds a lot like bullshit bingo.

On its own it is, but I think the idea behind it is to quantify your goals with specific numbers and quantify how you intend to get there.

For example, one way to increase sales by 20% might be to increase visitors to your website by 20%. But another method, if only 10% of visitors download your software, increasing that to a 12% conversion rate will also increase sales by 20%. Lifting downloads from 10% to 12% might be easier than finding 20% more visitors. By thinking in specific numbers, you can brainstorm different ways to achieve the goal and choose the method that is fastest / least effort.

A good old article. Not really from 2011 - I'd say it's probably a decade older than that (I remember reading it a LONG time ago, and Pavlina has left the business long before 2011).

Are there even any sustaining (lifestyle income) desktop shareware vendors left?

Sure! They are no longer called shareware though.

As iso suggests, the shareware term sort of degraded and then faded away. Shareware initially was this reaction to commercial retail software that you bought for hundreds of dollars and might not even be returnable if it didn't run properly on your system for some reason. The Association of Shareware Professionals in particular promoted try-before-you-buy without crippling. (I was an ASP member in the 90s though I didn't work at it full-time.)

After I stopped selling software, what continued to be called shareware generally degraded into a lot of crippleware and demoware. At the same time, limited time software trials became ubiquitous, open source started becoming important in the mainstream desktop world, and the Web eroded a lot of the traditional distribution distinction between "real" retail software and small operations.

So "shareware" as a meaningful category just sort of faded away.

Talking of open source, it seems like many of the people who'd have once been shareware developers are now the one making add ons and mods for open source software. Just look at how much of the WordPress plugin repository is filled with 'lite' versions of commercial plugins, many of which act like shareware software of old.

Same with the plugin scene for other scripts, including some commercial ones.

Incidentally the ASP is still around, with mostly the same old guard of members, but they've since renamed themselves to the Association of Software Professionals. Technically I'm still a lifetime member of the ASP but I haven't logged in for years.

Freemium would probably be today's equivalent model. Give away a free version that you encourage people to share as widely as possible, then try to upsell 1% of them on a Pro version.

Yes, there are lots! But we prefer calling ourselves "indie developers" now :)

I don't have any numbers, but I don't think that the absolute number of shareware developers has decreased. It's just that the mobile ecosystem has exploded so that the desktop ecosystem looks tiny in comparison now.

Software like WinRAR are still traditional shareware.

Many SaaS offer a "Lite" plan and the first 14 days a trial plan. That is basically what you got from a traditional shareware product.

Free2Play games are basically also shareware.

Yup, there's a reference to the original article in archive.org in February 2003, though not an archive of the page itself then: https://web.archive.org/web/20030215133929/http://www.dexter...

Holy shit, Steve Pavlina! Yeah, he left the business long time ago; I was reading his personal development blog around 2006-2007 and he was out already.

(RE personal development - I learned this and that, but overall I remember it having a very New Age vibe to it.)

Yes, that was a very strange experience following that blog. I followed it very closely for a while, even trying the uberman sleep schedule. I eventually realized that he had totally gone off the deep end and stopped following it. I came back a year later and looked at it in amazement. It was around the time he started "experimenting" with different sexual habits, and then not surprisingly losing his wife...

I remember recommending the blog to a couple of people just before I abandoned it. They must think I'm very strange.

Sorry we got that wrong. 2011 was the earliest copy the Internet Archive had. I've put 2003 up for now, but that's probably too late as well.

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