Programming for profit...
So, Veronica has had at least 2 people come in now whom could be potential customers of mine as well. This has lead to a conclusion which really isn't all that surprising to me, but might be more surprising to others not in this industry.
Writing good software is a time consuming and expensive process! There are ways to reduce the cost to the end user, but the most common is volume. Working on the side, I don't plan on doing volume. I write an application with the intention that is being installed in one place. So if I'm charging for it, I need to recoup any costs I want in a single sale or else run the risk of never getting that time or money back.
There are still plenty of places for me to make a LOT of money. But there are also places where I simply cannot compete. Veronica found one for me this week. A guy doesn't like that the software company he is with now charges a renewal fee to keep the software active... but the software is dirt cheap and so is the renewal fee. $130 up front and $17/year. Unless I were doing this as my full time job and planning on doing volume sales... I could only make the amount of money I want and still be competitive if I could write the entire application in a little more than 1 hour. I could match my current wages if I could do it in 4-5 hours and I could make minimum wage if I did it in 13 hours. Realistically, this would be 40 hours of work to get an initial build. I would need to anticipate that I could sell 20-40 units to make a reasonable amount of money for the coding time invested and remain competitively priced.
But there are places where people are being charged out the nose. Web design for instance. I've seen people charge between 500-1000 for a single page of basic HTML. I could write what they offer in 20 minutes. Which if you do the math is $1500-3000/hour. The only people on this planet who make that much money for their time run huge corporations and don't necessarily even deserve those wages. Granted, these prices drive away a lot of business and they need to charge this much off the few saps they lure in just to make ends meet.
I can deliver an interactive Silverlight page that looks nice and has some moderate complexity in about an hour. If I charged $100 for it I would be paid far better than I would being an employee doing the same work anywhere else, and I would be providing a valuable service to local businesses at a reasonable price at the same time. For $200, I can find hosting for them paid for the first year and probably make even more money and still cost them less than the competition. And I've seen some of the end results of those who would be my competition and it is disgusting to think they profited off the garbage they delivered. Try it one day... find a local business with a hideous web site, then go in and find out who did and for how much... then go home and vomit.
The other place to make many is to hunt down industries dominated by over priced software. Veronica is in such an industry and so is my brother. With the only well known software solutions costing a couple thousand dollars it is a huge investment for a small business. Plus they simply don't have a need for the full range of functionality offered and most times there isn't a "lite" version. In those scenarios I can write software for them in a trivial amount of time and if I were charging them, could charge far less.
Writing good software is a time consuming and expensive process! There are ways to reduce the cost to the end user, but the most common is volume. Working on the side, I don't plan on doing volume. I write an application with the intention that is being installed in one place. So if I'm charging for it, I need to recoup any costs I want in a single sale or else run the risk of never getting that time or money back.
There are still plenty of places for me to make a LOT of money. But there are also places where I simply cannot compete. Veronica found one for me this week. A guy doesn't like that the software company he is with now charges a renewal fee to keep the software active... but the software is dirt cheap and so is the renewal fee. $130 up front and $17/year. Unless I were doing this as my full time job and planning on doing volume sales... I could only make the amount of money I want and still be competitive if I could write the entire application in a little more than 1 hour. I could match my current wages if I could do it in 4-5 hours and I could make minimum wage if I did it in 13 hours. Realistically, this would be 40 hours of work to get an initial build. I would need to anticipate that I could sell 20-40 units to make a reasonable amount of money for the coding time invested and remain competitively priced.
But there are places where people are being charged out the nose. Web design for instance. I've seen people charge between 500-1000 for a single page of basic HTML. I could write what they offer in 20 minutes. Which if you do the math is $1500-3000/hour. The only people on this planet who make that much money for their time run huge corporations and don't necessarily even deserve those wages. Granted, these prices drive away a lot of business and they need to charge this much off the few saps they lure in just to make ends meet.
I can deliver an interactive Silverlight page that looks nice and has some moderate complexity in about an hour. If I charged $100 for it I would be paid far better than I would being an employee doing the same work anywhere else, and I would be providing a valuable service to local businesses at a reasonable price at the same time. For $200, I can find hosting for them paid for the first year and probably make even more money and still cost them less than the competition. And I've seen some of the end results of those who would be my competition and it is disgusting to think they profited off the garbage they delivered. Try it one day... find a local business with a hideous web site, then go in and find out who did and for how much... then go home and vomit.
The other place to make many is to hunt down industries dominated by over priced software. Veronica is in such an industry and so is my brother. With the only well known software solutions costing a couple thousand dollars it is a huge investment for a small business. Plus they simply don't have a need for the full range of functionality offered and most times there isn't a "lite" version. In those scenarios I can write software for them in a trivial amount of time and if I were charging them, could charge far less.
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