Now comes the research portion of your software project.

If you have not yet registered with the site (or sites), you can do that now.

Then, go through the "top sellers", or "hot buys" list for each site.

 Visit the product page for each item and note down (Excel or are text file are both fine) the following:

• Name of product
• General category (e.g. Helpdesk, advertising, security)
• Any questions and features that are often mentioned.

Once you have done at least 20, go back over them and pick a general category you want to create a product for.

Go back through those products and note down all you can find out about the features they have, and those that are asked for.

You will use this to plan out your list of requirements before you create your product.

Note that while this shortcut gets you lined up on a product that people want, you are unlikely to end up on the top sellers list yourself unless you do a really good job.  Many of the products you find there will have been around for several years.  This is a quick way to get a product done and selling so you can use the revenue for other things.

Much like any other for of selling, to sell software, you need to start with a target market.  A group of people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer them.  Fortunately, the internet makes this quite easy to discover, though it can take some time.

For the purposes of being able to sell without needing a web site or anything else that might cost, you need to go looking for a specific type of web site.

It needs the following features:

1. To be popular.  Fortunately, Google already figures this out for us.
2. To be focussed on a target group or market
3. To host and process payment for software products for you
4. To not charge any set up fees.
5. To have a "most popular" or "top sellers" list

Any easy way to get a ready made target market is to produce "add-ons", these are often referred to as "modules", "extensions", or "add-ins".  These are small pieces of software designed to extend or alter the behaviour of existing applications.  Your target market is then defined as the owners of that application, or a sub-group of them.

Some examples of applications you could target are:

• Photoshop
• DotNetNuke
• PHPNuke / PostNuke
• Microsoft Word / Excel / Access / etc
• FireFox
• Joomla
• WordPress
• Internet Explorer

I recommend you do some searches for programming languages you know, and  see what you can come up with.  I'm going to go with "DotNetNuke" for this as I'm familiar with it from previous work I've done.

Searching Google for dotnetnuke purchase commission brings up a number of sites.

Two that are potentially useful are:

• SnowCovered.com
• DotNetNuke Marketplace

You are likely to arrive somewhere deep inside the site, so make sure you check out the home page.  Both these sites are suitable for this because they meet all the criteria that I specified earlier.

If you want to follow along with this process, go and do your research now, I'll be posting the next step within a few days.

A lot of people think that businesses run on a bunch of complex and expensive applications.  SAP, JD Edwards, MS CRM and the like.

The truth is that the vast majority of businesses are SMALL businesses.  And a small business usually runs on a combination of an accounting package, pen and paper, MS Word, MS Excel and maybe MS Access.

However, a time comes when a growing business finds that the systems they have been using are now causing them more trouble than they solve.  A smart or lucky business finds that out before the whole thing breaks down.

Then they need to progress to a better system. 

• Pen and paper moves to Excel or Access. 
• Excel moves to Access. 
• Access moves to SQL Server, and a web or desktop front end,
• or maybe an off the shelf application.

Applications move from being single user to being able to function with 5 or 10 people using them at once.

A very large proportion of what I do as a bespoke developer involves taking an existing Excel or Access based system, and moving it to the next step.

I'm considering taking an Access application I wrote over 10 years ago, and turning it into a .NET Windows application.

As part of the exercise, I can record the process on video and create a training course out of it.

If anyone would be interested in learning how to convert Access applications to .NET "nicely", drop a comment in and I'll start the process.