Thoughts on Business Model

I have recently seen a surge in the sites that sell software products based on scripts like ASP, ASP.net and PHP. There are many sites like aspin.com and hotscripts.com that promote these products with links to them.

I am planning to develop some products and was wondering what you guys think, is there scope to sell in such a crowded market.

How many licenses do you think the vendors would be selling in a month ?

Please let me know your thoughts.

For what it is worth, here is what I think. There isn't a lot of money to be made with this sort of thing - the market is small, and most of the people who are in the market can also write code. If you want to pursue it, I would suggest developing some very useful scripts you can give away and start building a following for your work. As you learn the ropes, you might find some of your following will be willing to pay for more advanced products, and if you have a good method for getting comments from your following they will help guide you into the things they are willing to buy. If you find that you get very little interest, at least you will not have wasted too much effort.

A similar use of this concept follows:
I was involved with a developer who wrote an automated build system which sold for about $200 US. This was not a script, but rather a compiled exe application. He did very well with it until the last few years as there are now a number of open source and other similar tools available. But the point is, he also had a free registry cleaning tool that was prominent on his site, and brought a lot of traffic to his page as it was recommended on developement sites all over the web. People who used the reg cleaning tool were generally developers, and if they liked it (which they usually did) it gave them confidence that his build tool was equally good (which it was). Anyway - the free item brought a lot of customers for the non-free item.

Its just a thought.

Woody,

Thank you for your thoughts on this.

There a lot of free scripts in the market but when you look around on the aspin.com and hotscripts.com websites there are many commercial advertisers too, which made me feel that there is probably a market where many people still buy these products as these companies are spending a lot of money on advertising.

On the free product strategy, yes this is one time tested method I think many Open Source products are based on, and is bound to work in long term. Totally agree with you on this.

Hi Mithsi,

I agree with the free script to leads model. As I have been in business I have learned that just because people are selling things does not mean it is selling.

By that I mean I have often seen people impressed with snappy websites selling products, that make it look like the owner is doing well. Come to find out they are not making ANY money at all.

So all those sites you see selling products on Hotscripts does not mean they are making money.

Thank you for your suggestion, I do agree but I did try and do a search on the product to find many people using them and also reading all the reviews for the products over the recent times made me arrive at the market situation.

Let me know what you think !