[EnigmaFlare]

I've got reasonable financial success in my software product mainly from the merits of the tech. Pretty much all the marketing I ever did was spamming a small mailing list once, making an anonymous website that subtly mentioned my product, got good Google ranking, and got referenced by other people, and eventually making a Wikipedia page which I'm not sure does any good. I got good ranking in Google early on without any particular effort, probably because there just aren't many competitors.

Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.

I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.

It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.

[atomicnature]

What's the product if I may ask? Or at least the general category of products you operate in - if you don't mind mentioning it.

[EnigmaFlare]

I'm a bit shy about the details but it's used by engineers. Actually there's a lot of opportunity in software for engineers. They pay huge prices and the quality of what they have is often poor. I'm aware of some gaps in the market. For example, modeling thermal distortion due to robot welding. That's not what my product does but that's one where the existing solutions are something like $50,000/year and it's a hard problem in part because the software has to run faster than an actual welding robot making a prototype to be economical to model it in the first place. It takes some clever research to invent the secret sauce to get those speeds.

[atomicnature]

That's an interesting example, thanks for sharing.