[Applejinx]

Yes, I do. Forcing upgrades is just another way to force sales, and that's competition. Churn happens.

The old laptop is just the most convenient sort of virtual machine. At some point it'll be easier to run a virtual time capsule laptop… however, the physical time capsule laptop is from a time before intense spyware, so there are security issues as well.

As far as niches, Airwindows doesn't market at all. It's only word of mouth, for ten years, with few exceptions (notably, Console2 got reviewed in Tape Op, a trade magazine). This is personal: I loathe getting harassed by marketers so much that I won't even email, much less advertise. I collected a list of the 'Kagi generation' customers who specifically said they wanted to be on a mailing list and hear from me that way. And then I haven't emailed anything to them for months and months :) So, effectively, my business is 'for people who hate marketing so much that they want to do business with someone who will absolutely leave them alone and not bug them'.

By definition this is a niche to starve in, but it's sincere. I really do hate most everything about marketing, so I simply will not do it. Sometimes when I have a notable post or product I leave out the patreon link on purpose :)

[walterbell]

Haha, new marketing category: product only available for purchase in a 24-hour period that happens twice a year, or on a date decided by the roll of a dice in a youtube video, or by solving a puzzle, or .. :)

[Applejinx]

But you're still saying 'purchase', and my market sector is completely dominated by software piracy to the point where it's choking on sketchy and unreliable DRM.

More like, 'new' marketing category: Trust Building Exercise. Attempt to give everything possible away, and see if social pressure can cause a lot of people to go 'yay!' and throw money. Hence the Patreon with literally no tiers above 1$, with at least half the patrons from 2$ to 10$ on their own volition.

The trouble with that (speaking as someone who has some notion of marketing but chooses to undermine it) is, it's one of those power-law relationships where basically you have to be me to do it :) without ten years of sorta grassroots presence in the industry and a large number of successful products that perform well as software, you can't do it. You can't simply start up and have a Patreon work on those terms, even if your products are exactly as good, and this is a problem.

Solving that would be a very big deal but it's a bit beyond me for now…