| If you want to sell software, essentially you did it backwards: you made some stuff for yourself that solves a problem you have or completes a task. Now you hope to sell some of the better stuff for a few bucks. But to sell software to someone else, you need to know that the benefit you’re offering to potential customers is something that they actually want or need. For example, the tool to learn keyboard shortcuts. How many customers want that? How many customers have a pain point with being unable to learn keyboard shortcuts? Of those people, how much are they willing to pay for the solution? How will you find those prospects and convert them into paying customers? Your ideas haven’t really been validated by anyone (unless they actually have users and you haven’t mentioned it) The other part of this equation is that having a business with customers is way often far more work than the time spent building the technical solution. You say that these solutions are basically done but that’s the easy part. If the goal was to make these projects into a business you might as well have pitched the ideas before you even built them…because if prospective customers showed you their disinterest you could have spared yourself the time and effort actually building them in the first place. If you have a thousand people who gave you their email for a waiting list for beta access to a product you haven’t even started building that’s way better than having a finished product with no interested parties. All of that said, my advice would be to put those projects in your portfolio for your resume for your industry job. They can be the projects you talk about when interviewers ask you about your experience (but you also need to convince employers that you can work well on a team team others). If you want a job in the industry you need to focus more on the quality of your resume and your job application process than any of your actual coding work. The task of getting a tech job is almost entirely detached from everything you’ve done to this point. You are working a numbers game where less than 10% interview rate is normal and expected, so your job now is to be as efficient and effective as possible, putting on the best show for prospective employers. I would get more eyes on my resume to hone it and make sure it is one that will get you a high interview percentage. I wouldn’t waste my time on the side project stuff unless one or more of them was something I was confident in enough to dedicate a significant effort into making selling and supporting that product. |