Should I sell my shareware program and site or try to market it?

Back when the Internet bubble burst I spent some time unemployed and wrote a windows client program that creates web photo albums and eBay auction listings and uploads them to the web via FTP. You can see it here:

http://www.pixmatrix.com

I tried selling it for awhile but didn't like dealing with customer support issues. I've had some recognition, lots of 5 star ratings (like CNet's Download.com) but don't really have an interest in marketing it. Kind of ironic because I'm really into affiliate marketing, SEO and SEM. C++ client software is just not my thing anymore.

One of the interesting things about the program is that every time someone creates a web photo album, I can insert an iframe with a banner ad. At one point I thought it would be neat if I could get a 1,000's of web photo albums around the world with my ads for SEM/SEO. But that would require marketing effort...

I can't help but think that this program would have some potential if I could find it in myself to promote it, but it really is a distraction from other web sites that I want to build.

So, what should I do? Sell it? I probably have 60k worth of work in it given my hourly rate. Seems like it would be difficult to get that kind of money. Should I get off my ass and try promoting it?

Thanks for the advice,
James

 

I looked at your site twice.

I think you are going to need to market it or do a joint venture/limited partnership type thing to make any money off of it. The image hosting filed is a little over-saturated.

You are giving it away at the moment. Not sure what something like that would sell for. There is some comparable stuff out there. The best use might be to give it away and market the ad potential.

I did not get that far into the reading. Does it have publishing capacity? Or does the user need to learn ftp?

 

The user needs to know FTP. I tried to address it with a wizard that has presets for the major ISP's (earthlink, AOL, etc) so that they can just enter their e-mail address and password. This is to take advantage of the free space most ISP's give you. Particularly handy for eBay auction image hosting.

I have tried selling it at various price points. $29.99 per copy would garner about 10 sales a month with next to no marketing. I think a lot of those sales were eBay people and small business owners on shared hosting plans. $9.99 would earn the same amount of money, but with a lot more work in supporting people. Unfortunately the concepts of FTP/Disk Space, Web vs local storage and folder hierarchies are over most people's heads. Some colleges are using it for teaching web concepts.

I thought of converting over to monthly fees and offering image hosting along with it to eliminate the FTP learning curve.

Thanks for your feedback, its appreciated.
James

 

if you decide to sell please pm me we might be interested in buying this

 

thanks ihostdev. I will

 

I am still not clear on whether or not the program has ftp built in or if another program is required. With built in ftp you have a strong program.

To answer the quote above. A sale with optional hosting might be your best course of action. Perhaphs a self expiring trial-ware version good for 30-90 days.

Colbyt

 

It has built in FTP, batch image insertion and batch image manipulation, is a full blown WYSIWYG HTML editor and even has spell checking. I spent some time and a bit of money on it a few years ago when I was still doing windows client programming.

 

How much do you want for the site and all rights to the programs?

Thanks.

 

Actually 10 sales at $29.99 for little to no promotion isn't too bad. It does make better than some websites in ad sales.

The thing is that now that your program is listed as free, it would be hard to go back to a paying mode, unless you do a total revamp of the program. One thing might be that the free version flies your banners but the paid version does not.

You could keep the software and marketing it in house if it is not too much trouble hosting it.