The most important thing to consider when deciding on a shareware project is how interesting you find the subject. You can be an authority on a subject but, if you couldn‘t face dealing with it every day for years, you won‘t be able to put the effort into a long-term project. If there is a small, short-term project which can use your experience this may be better suited but beware – small projects have a way of evolving far beyond their origins.
If you are interested in a subject but have little experience in the field then you shouldn‘t allow this to discourage you – enthusiasm is a powerful tool in research and development. You may also find that your programming skills are more important to the task than the technical aspects of the subject. Audiotools is a good example of working from this viewpoint – my audio experience has grown and been used during the development but my abilities as a Windows developer and my intuitive grasp of algorithm development has been of more use in evolving the program.
It‘s important to think in terms of what a project could become – you could write small self-contained applications which all deal with different aspects of the same problem, but few people would buy all of them and some people may even resent having to buy two programs from the same author for similar tasks. If the ideas are fairly disparate, it makes no sense to develop an application which combines them but, if they are in some way related, this may not be the case.
The competition for your product should also be considered. Don‘t write off an idea because it strays into the territory of companies such as Microsoft. These companies may be large and have a great deal of resource, but they tend to cater for the lowest common denominator. If your twist on the idea would only interest a small proportion of the market then there would be no advantage for the larger companies to steal your ideas and that‘s assuming that they are capable of it – never underestimate your own intelligence. You may also be pricing your product considerably lower than the competition and you could make a better job of your software than they have of theirs. These are very effective ways of building a sympathetic market and there will always be customers for a cheap, well-written alternative.
The competition can also be considered as a source of ideas – if company X has one unique feature and company Y another, what could you gain by bringing these into one product? What happens if you take an idea from a product and extend it to its logical conclusions, or even past them? Unique ideas come not only from thin air, but from evaluation of existing solutions.
When you start getting ideas for software, write them down! It doesn‘t matter how crazy they sound when you start, aspects of one idea may be useful when combined with another, unrelated, idea. Thumbnail sketches of interfaces, flow diagrams and even logos may fire the imagination and build your enthusiasm. Keep your notes in a safe place – during a lull in activity later you may come back to them and remember what you were thinking when you wrote them.
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