My Big Shareware Splash

Originally published on: Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:01:28 +0000

Please Note!

As of November 20, 2011, MailSend is free software. References to a continuing for-pay version of the software in this article are out-of-date. Please see this blog post:
http://www.mailsend-online.com/blog/mailsend-is-free.html

Okay...back to the original post...

If you peek through the archives of alt.comp.shareware.programmer, you'll see posts from me in the mid-90's asking questions from the guys who were actually making money by selling their own software.

In April of 1997, I took the big plunge and unleashed a real product onto the masses by way of the SimTel archive:

Jim Lawless Apr 23 1997, 1:00 am Newsgroups: comp.archives.ms-windows.announce Followup-To: comp.archives.ms-windows.discuss From: (Jim Lawless) Date: 1997/04/23 Subject: mailsend.zip - Command-line Internet mailer for Win95/NT

I have uploaded to Simtel.Net:

{URL's removed}mailsend.zip 109880 bytes

mailsend.zip Command-line Internet mailer for Win95/NT

The Mailsend program is a utility for automating Internet e-mail transfers. Mailsend is run from the Win95 command-line. It allows the user to specify a text file and a recipient. The text file will then be sent to the recipient via Internet mail.

By using mailsend within a batch file, a user can send a single text file to a list of users. This feature makes it a practical tool for automating periodic e-mail transmissions such as electronic magazines or announcements via e-mail.

Shareware. Uploaded by the author.

I was quite energetic about writing and selling my own software in the mid-90's. Perhaps not as energetic as people who made lots of money, but I put a fair amount of time into the study of people who made money selling products on their own.

In 1997, I happened to be writing a review of the Thompson Automation AWK compiler for an article I had pitched to Dr. Dobbs Journal ( see Examining the TAWK Compiler ). I wrote a small client for the Internet finger protocol to demonstrate the compiler's versatility. As I was going over the code, I had wondered what it would take to flesh out the finger client a little more to make an SMTP e-mail client.

My first attempt was fruitful. I had a command-line emailer working that would simply send text messages via SMTP mail without a lot of frilly features. I did not initially support attachments or other niceties. I decided to use my new creation, MailSend, as a test to learn more about independent software sales. ( Please note that over the years, a number of command-line emailer products have taken the name MailSend ... not just mine. )

I found out how to format the supplementary readme files and metadata files whose origins could be traced back to the download sections of electronic Bulletin-Board Systems. I wrote a license agreement and a liberal support policy. I offered free upgrades for life. That was a huge mistake on my part.

My thinking was that I was going to be constantly evolving the product, so if bugs or defects arose, I would simply ask the client to obtain the free upgrade to see if they could recreate the problem with the newest version. I was concerned about being able to support multiple simultaneous versions.

Another concern I had was that I had written the code in a pretty obscure compiler: TAWK. I had reasoned that the entire command-line compiler and the source code to MailSend fit neatly on one 1.44M floppy disk ... so I could carry it around and could recompile it on just about any machine.

After discussing things with the folks on alt.comp.shareware.programmer, I found that many of them took non-traditional approaches to writing their software as well. Some wrote in PowerBASIC, many wrote in Delphi, some in varieties of C/C++. I began to realize that the lone wolf developer needed to leverage whatever they were most comfortable with, as long as the tool itself did not become obsolete.

I priced the software at $10 ( another big mistake ) and made a few announcements here and there on various newgroups and forums.

I was very happy when the first checks made their way to my mailbox. I was seeing a nice little stream of money for this product, but it wasn't anywhere near what the professionals on a.c.s.p. were making with their software.

After accepting only checks via mail for quite some time, I received an e-mail from a corporate prospect who asked me if I could accept payment via credit-card. I couldn't at the time, but I asked him to let me see if I could find a card processor. My first attempt at signing up for a credit-card processor was very painful. I canceled the membership before any payments were processed.

I then signed up for RegSoft ( now a Digital River company. ) Although I seemed to have a gift for making mistakes along the way, signing up with RegSoft was the best decision I had made regarding MailSend. In 24 hours after signing up, they processed two orders for MailSend. Neither of these was from the gentleman who had asked if he could pay with a credit-card.

The registrations were becoming much more frequent than the checks-in-the-mail had been.

My mentors in a.c.s.p. attributed this to impulse buying; It's easier to procrastinate on a purchase if it takes work ( such as writing out a check, addressing an envelope, ...etc. ) If one can simply fill out a web page and receive a product electronically in a short time, chances are greater that the sale will commence.

Sometime around these years, I also began participating in the Euro-Share mail-list. Lots of good conversations went on there. You might Google Euro-share archive if you'd like to see the posts.

I should note that I also added a limiting factor to the trial version of MailSend at this time. One could only send about ten emails using the trial version. After that, they would have to reboot their machine so that they could send another ten. I'll discuss protection and nagware in a future post.

I would still refer to the monthly income I was making as hobby-level money, but it was GOOD hobby-level money. I began to grow my stable of products with some smaller utilities. ( Please see Throwaway Software : HangUp and A Command Line Scheduler. )

I had begun to make two-hundred to three-hundred dollars each month most months in the early days. I made a few deals for large site-license purchases of my products for several thousand dollars each. By the time the year 2000 had rolled around, I felt like a true independent software developer, although I didn't make nearly enough to quit my day-job.

One of the things that I had not planned for was the costs of doing business. My registration processor took a percentage of each sale. I bought software tools and libraries. $10 was too low of a price-point. When customers wanted bulk-purchase deals, I had already cut out most of the cost of the product, so I had no place to go.

Several of my customers told me that I wasn't charging enough and regularly registered two copies for each one they needed.

Heeding some advice, I raised the price to $20. I placed a blurb on my site about the increase, stating that it would occur a couple of months away. I really didn't see any sort of attempts to license MailSend before the change.

When I finally did change the price, it was a non-event. Customers paid $20 per copy and didn't quibble a bit, unless they were interested in bulk-purchase discounts. Pricing the product was definitely something I should have given more consideration.

The biggest mistake I made was that I do not charge for upgrades for MailSend. I recently read a quote from Joel Spolsky who stated that nothing affects the sales of their defect-tracking software FogBugz like a new release with new features. Joel's company ( Fog Creek ) sees more sales from upgrades when the new features are worth having than they do from any form of advertisement or sales event.

I have great plans for MailSend, but for a while, they took a back seat to paying gigs. When offered the chance to consult for a fee, I opted for the money instead of opting to work on my software.

I am going to have to rethink this policy as I still have many plans for MailSend's future.

A lot of things happened during the dot-com crash that adversely affected my sales. A number of sites that fed me customers went out of business. Tech companies seemed to be more frugal in their spending at that time and the popularity of my niche products began to wane.

In yet another mistake, I had ignored my mentors who recommended to all new software authors to secure a domain-name. Well, I didn't. I had known the founders of my Internet Service Provider, so I decided to just keep my personal URL as the reference point for my software. The ISP ended up selling. The new ISP added a tilde (~) to my home page URL, so all of the links I had spread out among the various Usenet posts and other places were now broken.

I also believe that it's much easier to send email in modern times. Most modern programming languages provide some type of SMTP interface in their runtime libraries, so my product isn't quite as sought-after as it used to be.

Also, I face a lot of competition; there are a number of very capable command-line mailers out there. Some are free of charge. Some authors make their source code available via open-source licensing models.

MailSend and my other utilities still provide me with a passive cash-flow, but they don't generate the revenue that they once did. I learned a lot and have a lot more to learn as I continue to support these products and forge ahead creating new ones.

My stories about these early programs aren't over, yet. In a future "Tale Recursion" post, I'll discuss the somewhat controversial topic of protection-schemes in trial software and will discuss the various techniques I have used.

You may obtain trial versions of MailSend and my other software at: ttp://www.mailsend-online.com

Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright ©2009 by James K. Lawless

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