I started as an IT consultant att the age of 15, setting up a file server at a
small company with two employees. I learned a lot and I'm still running the
same system for the same company that has now grown considerably. It's a great
side project and it's awesome to see a company grow, specially since this is
an industrial company that differs quite a lot from my day job at an IT
company.
To keep track on my hours working at the company above, I build a simple CRM
system that then grown to an ERP system. It's well suited to my needs, it has
a TUI interface, looking much like vim and it's extremly fast! One design goal
is that every view should be shown under 100 ms, it does.
I like a native interface and wrote the system mostly as a C library that I
could strap on a thin user interface layer to. Then I wrote the first user
interface in C using ncurses (or at least some small parts of ncurses). Since
I doubt there's a big market for this system, I also made a web frontent. It
works quite well, but it's a bit clumsy to work with. When I've added a few
more frontents (iOS and Android are next) I think I'll really see the
strengths of this approach.
I was consulting for a small business and they needed a punch clock. Most time
tracking software are very sofisticated with support for billing, projects
etc. Totally overkill if you only wants to report work, sick leave, vacation,
etc.
The current solution they had was one of these really compentent systems, they
used a fraction of the features and got hit by quite a lot of bugs that that
system had. I took the oppertunity of pitching my ERP system and got my first
sale!
So how do you turn an ERP system into a punch clock? I used the flexibility of
the system and quickly got something working. I worked I though. After two
months and many new bugs found they told me that my system simply wasn't good
enough and that they had to find another one.
I continued to fix the bugs, added some features (mostly user interface) and
told them that I was dedicaded to give them a solution they where happy with.
To show this I refused to get pay until they had use the system for a full
month without finding a single bug. I took 6 months, but then I could send my
first invoice!
I now have a functioning system, that I've been working on for 10 years. I've
one customer and have got 50 usd in revenue. Now I need to increase my
customer base!
Sales are hard, really hard! I hate lifting the phone and contact new
customers. I try to do one cold call every day to companies similar to my
current customer. It takes a lot of will power to lift the phone. So far, no
luck. One customer is a start, two is more than good luck. I'm going to keep
on trying for a few weeks before I'm going to pivot to another approach.
How did you manage to sell your software? Give me tips on iveqy@iveqy.com