Is Shareware a Career?

One very important piece of advice – don‘t give up your day job!! At least not at first. If you have sufficient funds to live on for a few years, you may be able to take a chance and make shareware your job. It takes a few years to get an idea of whether you can succeed with a particular product and to anticipate the rises and falls in your monthly income. If you have a partner who is prepared to work in order to support you and allow you to try your hand then this is a much better solution. If you commit evenings and weekends to a project you can build up your business to the point where you are confident enough to take the plunge and go it alone. You may find it best to hedge your bets and release two or three products before you reach this point. Try not to over-commit though, if your day job suffers because of your shareware then this could give you problems. I‘ll discuss the conflict between day jobs and shareware in more depth in a later article.
Ultimately you should consider that there are over 8 billion people on the Earth. Something over 200 million of them have access to the Internet and if you can persuade 0.1% of those to part with enough money to make you $10 from each (not the same as charging $20 as I will explain later) then you will have $2 million – enough to provide an income of $40,000 (based on a typical net real rate of return of 2% - that‘s interest after tax leaving enough for the capital to grow in line with inflation). The trick is making that many people buy the software in the lifetime of the product and, more importantly, in your own lifetime. Some shareware products may never sell more than a couple of copies – others may sell millions in a couple of years. It‘s best to hope for somewhere in between. Companies such as NikoMak (authors of WinZip) and Jasc (authors of PaintShop Pro) have made good professional successes out of shareware with radically different pricing and marketing policies – it‘s all a matter of how much you want the success..