Why is selling software so weird?

Why is selling software so weird?
zeptonaut.com

By contrast building houses, even at scale, is pretty low risk, but since its low risk the upside is constrained.

In many ways software is a lot more like making movies. You have to do the whole thing before you see any revenue. Risk is high, most lose money, but a few make the big bucks.

This model does favour those who can take on more risk - ie companies with deep pockets. Even there risk is mitigated - formulas are followed, safe casting choices, sequels etc.

Smaller indie movies can still be wildly profitable, just on a smaller budget. Don't make Lord of the Rings, make The Blair Witch Project.

For me, we started out mitigating risk by writing customized software others paid for. When we had no work we worked on our own stuff. Over time our own stuff paid enough so we stopped doing custom stuff.

With every new project though we evaluate risk, try and keep it down, and so on. Mostly we mitigate risk by doing what we know, to our established market, (aka sequels).

5 years ago we had the opportunity and ability to enter a new market space and we discovered something new. 30 years ago we were selling the idea of computerising. We were competing literally with paper and pen. We often had to supply the actual computer - for some Companies it was their first, and only PC. While challenging, the upside to the customer was obvious and very valuable.

Wheras This new product was going into a space with 3 established compeditors. While objectively better, the existing ones were good enough, and as the cost of change is high it has been a long road to get some traction, which we are slowly doing. That we could afford to persist was because the other side of the business was working well enough to pay us. So think day job, and side project (with the side project having 3 full time employees :)).

The lesson - Today software isn't fighting pen and paper, it's fighting other software that is 10,20,or 30 years matured. The path we trod is not going to be the right path now.

There are gaps, but doing the non-software things like marketing, customer analysis etc upfront is now much more important than it used to be.

There are opportunities, but it takes a moment to imagine them, and a Lot of work to validate them, and most imaginations are incorrect. Doing the upfront work well will pay off multiple times later.

Oh and don't give up the day job too early...google may think self-driving-cars are the way of the road future, but they haven't quit search.

[1] huge is a relative term - what is huge for an individual might be trivial for a company.