There are many ways of coming up with ideas for your own software product, even if you don't already have an idea in the back of your mind.

Let's talk about one of the options.

If you'd like to jump into things quickly and you have capital available to spend to acquire software outright, you might consider purchasing existing source code.

You can purchase software that is already being sold publicly or you can find a programmer who has put code together but hasn't taken the time or energy to make it publicly available.

Buying Existing Software

Programmers are a notoriously introverted group.  In an episode of ScreenSavers on TechTV, a software programmer had put together an amazing piece of software that allowed artists to "paint" movies using film that had been shot with digital cameras.  It allowed for a surreal movie to be built in a matter of months using techniques that would have taken traditional artists years to complete.  This was some awesome software!

The host asked the developer the exact question I had in my mind: "Do you have any plans to market this software?" The response: "Well, I'm not sure yet." What was he thinking? This stuff was great! I wanted to download and try it out myself.

Even though it was an amazing piece of software, the developer hadn't even begun looking at ways to capitalize on it beyond what it was being used for the film they were currently producing.  You're going to find many similar stories for thousands of products that exist - but aren't on the market.

Yet.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF SOFTWARE PRODUCTS AVAILABLE, READY FOR YOU TO PACKAGE AND MARKET RIGHT NOW!

If you think I'm kidding.  Let me tell you some of what I have sitting on my hard drive waiting to be completed at the moment, and I sell software for a living.

• A ClickBank search engine, with Google style search functionality.  I'm just trying to figure a good licensing model, but I've left it for over a year.
• Improved version of my ConversionBooster split testing software.  Just need to install it and validate the results a few places.
• New Affiliate Program software.  Needs some more functionallity, but I'm currently testing the tracking / payments portion of it.
• Product Sales website.  Integrates membership, security, downloads, ordering via PayPal and 2Checkout.  Can include the split testing and affiliate software easily.  Need to package and promote it.
• License Key Generator.  Uses 256 bit Public/Private key encryption to secure license information.  You might be able to crack it to read the content, but you can't modify the license and have it work.