Selling Personal Projects
 

I was just curious if anyone has actually made money off of a personal project? People are always coming to this forum saying they need help to make a game or program that they plan to sell and make a lot of money off of, but as we all know that rarely happens, especially because most of these people are 13 and have no clue what they are doing haha. If I make something that is worthy of selling, I would probably just make it open source, but I am a bit curious of how to go about selling a personal project if I ever wanted to. If anyone has actually made money off of a personal project, how did you go about properly copy writing your program and promoting it, I have no clue how that process works?

The only times that i have made money off of coding, is doing custom work for a company/person. I have never made a software package of my own and sold it after. Then again i have never tried to make my own software and sell it ether.

I wrote an OS and sold it to a company. I wrote another piece of software and gave it to another company in return for them picking up the tab for patenting it. Actually, I did get a Kbuck from 'em, but that wasn't anywhere nearly as valuable as having the patent. I would never try to mass-market anything unless I knew dam' well it was a killer app (Dan Gibson's spreadsheet) or could get someone else to do it for me (Bill Gates trapping and using IBM).

I was doing a assignment this year and after I finished it I decided to develop it furthur. I guess im just lucky that I found a small business that needed the software I had developed, but anyway they offered to buy it and im good with that. Granted the software's not going to make big bucks but its a start for me.

Im not sure on the marketing stratagies but im sure alot of other members are. I was just in the right place at the right time and my family kind of knew the owners of the business so they probably bought it out of pity :rolleyes:

There are different techniques that can be enforced to protect the program but we all know that software gets cracked...If multi-billion businesses like Microsoft get thier software cracked then we don't stand a hope in hell of protecting ours. Thats just an opition by the way so don't go quoting me.

You may just relaese all your work under open source but in the real world people need money for food, acomidation etc:- so we have to make sacrifices to have the things in life we want. If you can relaese your work as open source and afford all the man made things in life you need then thats good.

Well I have a full time programming job, so I don't mind having the work I do on the side be open source... but if the chance came up where I could sell it that would be cool.

I've sold a few programs... most of which were customized software development projects for individuals or small companies. I have never attempted to sell anything on a massive scale. I suggest that you talk with a graphic designer, marketing researcher, advertiser, and a lawyer if you ever do go that route.

I think you are talking about contract work, which is not what I was really talking about, I have done a fair bit of contract work before.