* What mistakes cost shareware developers the most money?

Shareware authors that are too stingy in their restrictions initially or too easy in restrictions later on.  When you make a program, it needs to be usable enough that the potential customer can see what it does and how well it does it.  Some authors will cripple their program so much in fear that people won’t register it if it’s fully usable. But what happens is doing that causes the user to stop evaluating in and kills the network effect (which I’ll talk about more in a second).

But at the other end of the spectrum you have developers who never have any time-outs on their shareware.  At some point, in my view, all unregistered shareware should time out. Even if that time out period is very long (90 days) it will have long since maximized its network effect and the user has certainly had enough time to evaluate it.  Similarly, there needs to be a few “nice to have” features that aren’t core to the product’s usefulness that are restricted.

For example, if I were making a ZIP program, I would have the compressing and uncompressing features be free. But the password protection be disabled in the free version. But other than that be fully functional. On the other hand, after 120 days or so, I would still have it time out. That way, you are able to convert both types of users: The user who needs a certain feature and the user who has standardized on it.

With regards to the network effect, this is very important in shareware – you want people evaluating your product to be the ones who also promote it. If they are using your program, they’re likely to give it to someone else. Even if they don’t ultimately choose to buy it,  the longer they use it (up to a point) the more likely they are to recommend it to someone else who may then recommend it.

* What mistake has cost YOU the most money?

Overestimating the market for something.  One of our most useful and best programs is called Keyboard LaunchPad. It’s only $9.95 to register and it lets users assign pretty much anything they might do on their computer to a hot key (program launching, system commands, remembered clipboard contents, commands for specific programs, you name it).  We thought this would sell very well. But we’ve been very surprised at how low its sales are.  That sort of mistake can be quite costly.

Another mistake we’ve made on occasion is having our demos be too restricted. We’ve done this with WindowFX repeatedly because we haven’t figured out which features are “core” and which ones are not. So users will try it and stop evaluating it early because they’ll find too many features have been disabled from the free version.

The biggest, ongoing mistake we make is not releasing regular updates to our shareware versions.  We tend to believe that shareware versions need to be updated every 90 days on various sites for maximum popularity. But it’s often a pain (especially now) to go around updating those programs. But that effort pays off in increased sales but it’s just so tedious no one wants to do it.