I have been pondering about writing about this for awhile but I figured that since it’s Monday morning and I’m still waking up, why not put it out there and see what comes back.
Many of you may not realize this but I have been working on a side project outside of my main work now for quite awhile. To say that I’ve been working on it a lot is probably misleading, but the truth is, I have had this idea for a new software product since my CompuCollege days. Since then, I have been pecking away and this new application on and off. Without going into specific details, it’s a desktop security application designed to block both websites and applications. You simply create a “blacklist” of things you don’t want to run on your machine, and my program takes care of the rest. It’s not a firewall or proxy server, and it is designed so that even the dumbest employee could set it up, but has enough power that bigtime sysadmins could make real good use of it. It’s sort of like, it can be as simple as you want it to be, or more advanced if you need it to be.
I actually wrote the grandfather of this app while I was working at CompuCollege and we tried it there and it worked VERY well. Students were very annoyed when they couldn’t use MSN Messenger either installed, or off the web. The school’s firewall rules did not allow us to block these types of sites so we needed something else. I came up with a little app and it worked like a charm.
That’s where I got the idea that maybe if I developed it into something really solid, I might be able to market and sell it to schools, home users, and maybe even larger businesses.
Regardless, I haven’t spent much time on it in the last six months as my time has been pretty busy at home. But the fact is, the product itself is about 90% complete. I really only need to make a few minor cosmetic changes and then put it through it’s paces for testing then it’s ready to go.
The product has a name (which I’ll leave out for now), and I even have a good name for my software business. Registered my domains for websites and at one point even had a website built. However, the site was pretty ugly and I gave up on it because let’s face it, I’m not much of a web developer and if I want to be able to sell this thing, I need a good looking site.
Therein lies my problem. I am not a business or marketing person. Hell I don’t even really know if this would actually stand a chance out there. Problem is, because I have no business experience, I really have no idea where to take this or what steps to take to try and get this out there. There is a part of me that really thinks this has some big potential but then again so do many other people about their products and they all flop.
I’m looking to get some advice from people who actually understand how business works and whether or not I should try and put some effort into what I have built to try and sell it. I know I need a website but I also need to make sure that 1) It doesn’t look lame like I copied a template and made some modifications (which is what I normally do) and 2) It looks professional and serves the purpose of showcasing what this application does. Maybe I really should sit down and figure out how I want the web presence to look. It’s one thing to figure it out and another thing entirely to create it.
But aside from that, it’s the whole “how do I market this thing” and “is it worth it to me to try and push it” or should I just tidy the code up, and release it through some already existing means as an open source project for people to tinker with. I’d love to be able to make some money from it but I also think there’s a potential market for a product like this. Even huge businesses with massive IT budgets always have little spots that never seem to get covered in their security and I think my app could help fill that void. I know it would have been VERY useful at Norampac during my sysadmin days.
Anyways, if you know of anyone who knows much about marketing or business of small software products, send them my way. Know that I am not interested in leaving my day job anytime soon and that I am just interesting to get some other opinions from people out there who know more about the business side of things.I’m more than willing to try and demo the product for someone if they want to see it. Lastly, I don’t exactly have buckets of money laying around to put into a website or business development so whatever ideas you might have, the less expensive, the better 🙂
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