Yep … a great question. When I talk about what I do with friends and colleagues, I am often asked the question ”… but, if I was to write software, what software should I write ?”.
As a wise man once said to me :
Write about that which you know …
If you know about a topic, problem, situation it is often easy to write about it. Likewise with software … which is usually written to solve a problem or make something a lot easier.
A lot of successful shareware / trialware authors started out writing a piece of software for themselves to solve a particular problem they were dealing with or something they were trying to make easier for themselves.
Take WinZip as an example. This started off in the early 1990′s as a simple GUI frontend to the PKZIP compression software. WinZip has been marketed as try before you buy (shareware) since day one and over the years has become a household name.
Since the advent of WinZip, compression support has been built into Windows and there have been many compression programs written, some free and some marketed as shareware. There are even programs that help you recover your password from password protected ZIP files if you have forgotten it.
