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Yep … a great question.  When I talk about what I do with friends and colleagues, I am often asked the question  ”… but, if I was to write software, what software should I write ?”.

As a wise man once said to me :

Write about that which you know …

If you know about a topic, problem, situation it is often easy to write about it.  Likewise with software … which is usually written to solve a problem or make something a lot easier.

A lot of successful shareware / trialware authors started out writing a piece of software for themselves to solve a particular problem they were dealing with or something they were trying to make easier for themselves.

Take WinZip as an example.  This started off in the early 1990′s as a simple GUI frontend to the PKZIP compression software.  WinZip has been marketed as try before you buy (shareware) since day one and over the years has become a household name.

Since the advent of WinZip, compression support has been built into Windows and there have been many compression programs written, some free and some marketed as shareware.  There are even programs that help you recover your password from password protected ZIP files if you have forgotten it.

I have been asked that question a lot over the years.  The term Shareware has been used, mis-used, abused and bandied around as a bit of ‘buzz’ over time.

I had to explain it to my parents (who are not technical people by any stretch of the imagination) when I told them what I was doing.  Of course they had read the occasional media piece which mentioned the word, but they just didn’t grasp the essence of it.

Shareware is simple … it is a generic term for a method of marketing software …

The term shareware is synonymous with trialware and try before you buy.

All three refer to the fact that you, as the potential customer, get to download the software and try it out before you actually commit to spending any money.

The ultimate goal for most (not all) software authors is to get people to buy their software.  It’s the simple old commerce thing … I’ll provide you with something useful … you may me some money to compensate my for my thought and hard work.

Without large marketing budgets and the ability to get boxed software in pretty packaging in front of retail consumers, authors who write software need a method of getting there software purchased by the end user.

Most users would not be happy to pay money for something that :

1. Is not a household name
2. Is not proven and reliable
3. May not do what they want

… unless of course they could try it out for free before having to commit their hard earned cash.

Software developers, there are many resources you can find on the Internet which will help you with developing and marketing your software :

• Association of shareware professionals
• MySharewareSite.com
• Trialware Professional Association
• aFreeGo.com
• aFreeGoGold.com
• PadRepository.com
• SoftwareDaemon.com
• MyFreewareSite.com
• AddMeToTheList.com