What is the preferred process for sellling a personal project/product? [closed]

Question

I have begun work on a personal project that may end up having some real-world applicability. I am beginning to entertain the idea of selling licenses. I am sure some others here have done this before, and I was wondering what successfully processes you've used to do so.

There are many questions on SO regarding licensing, legal implications, etc. However, I have looked around and could not find a duplicate question for this one. To be clear, I am not looking for information on what licensing strategy to use, how to advertise your software, and so forth, but rather, for a checklist of things that should be done to increase the probability of success, and any possible gotchas I have not thought of. If anyone has any personal success stories, they would be very welcome.

For a little background, I am set on the idea of licensing a closed-source, compiled .NET DLL.

A few things off the top of my head:

• Strong documentation, because formal technical support is unlikely
• Specifying licensing terms and formalizing them with an attorney
• Code obfuscation
• Exploring license enforcement (either using a commercial package or custom code)
• Building a website around the product, including real-world code examples since this is a library
• Possibly offering some type of beta period, for feedback and getting the name out a bit
• Offering instant/automated purchases
• Marketing (oh boy)

Is it necessary (or wise) to start a one-man company to do this?

I will keep this list updated as answers come in. Thanks all!

Answer 1

Some tips:

Obfuscation: Be wary of obfuscating everything. An alternative is to obfuscate just the critical bits (licensing, premium features). The problem with obfuscating everything is that stack traces from error reports are ineffective. When an unexpected exception is caught, you'll want to give the user the option of automatically reporting its details - this really helps with QC.

License enforcement: If it's a utility that can be easily pirated, people WILL pirate it. An activations-based licensing system is ideal - and if it's not too draconian people will be less motivated to circumvent it. For instance, allow at least 3 activations per user (home computer, work computer, laptop). If it's a control library, then an activation-based may not be required - baking the serial number into the library may be enough because customers are unlikely to build their own product on a stolen assembly.

Instant/automated purchases: writing a custom licensing server and web page for this is fairly easy - you need only about 3 tables. LINQ to SQL is ideal for this sort of thing. For the payment gateway, I use PayPal - it's very easy to set up, has the features you need for selling activation codes, and allows multiple currencies. If you use PayPal, enable both PDT and IPN so you can give customers their activation codes both on the screen and via e-mail.

Marketing: try LOTS of things simultaneously - because it's hard to predict the success of any campaign. Especially without experience! Making yourself known amongst the influential people in the field into which you're selling can work very well.

Advertising: advertise on StackOverflow - that's what I'm doing! Google ad words is also worth trying because it's so cheap to set up - you'll know after spending $10 whether it will be effective for you or not.

And good luck with it!