£5 app. Monthly Brighton meetup for people interested in building (and maybe selling) lightweight software with 1-2 man teams. Nat and I went along last night and really enjoyed it.
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£5 app. Monthly Brighton meetup for people interested in building (and maybe selling) lightweight software with 1-2 man teams. Nat and I went along last night and really enjoyed it.
This sort of thing works in the Mac market, I think. I don't know whether there's such a market for small shareware apps on Windows; they certainly exist, but it's not routine to have three or four apps costing $10 on your machine like it is for Mac users. In the Linux world these sorts of apps are normally open-source and there's broadly no market at all, which is why I don't get involved with it. Unclear to me which model is best...
£5 app isn't just about shareware style applications - people go along who are interested in building web apps, open source packages and so on. In that respect I suppose the name is a bit confusing, but it works well in that it's meant to cover the entrepreneurial side of things as well.
The question of why shareware is thriving on the Mac came up at the talk (I've always found that really interesting too). Mac users expect quality software (in particular a high quality UI) and are willing to pay for it - apparently firms that sell both Windows and Mac versions of a shareware product often report that sales of the two are about equal, despite the massive disparity in market share.
One thing that really impressed me from the talk was this: if you can sell just 10 copies of a $30 application a day (apparently perfectly do-able in the Mac world) that's $100,000 a year. The TextMate chap must be raking it in!
Hi Simon, glad you liked our night :-)
The name originally came from a US blog post on the '$5 Idea', the story is here:
http://ianozsvald.com/2007/02/28/5-apps-a-new-geek -meet/
and our 6 events are written up under this tag:
http://ianozsvald.com/category/%c2%a35-app-meet/
We've covered shareware, free sites and commercial sites - the common factor being that everything is bootstrapped (rather than heavily-funded).
Next month Jeremy talks on building a web community around Irish Folk Music over the last 7 years (sign-up: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/264998/).
We're putting together a Django-powered £5 App site:
http://fivepoundapp.com/
to keep everything together and, with a touch of luck, it'll help spread the meme to other cities.