My plan was always to develop a software product. But life guided me to consulting and ad hoc business software development. In 2005, I started reading the Business of Software forums my dreams of creating a product come back again. Specially inspiring was the story of Patrick McKenzie, creator of Bingo Card Creator, a software that makes custom bingo cards. Patrick’s sales were tiny by then but he did something very special, he published his sales numbers (and he keeps doing it until now).
My first idea was to solve a personal pain: the clutter of my PC desktop. I made a small prototype in visual basic:
DeskSort, first prototype done in VB
Then, three years passed by. They were busy years, but I cannot blame it on that. I just lacked the focus. In the meanwhile I always had the idea alive, but did nothing to make it happen.
In December 2008 I started working again, with a focus and energy that wasn’t present before. I took the decision of developing the product in Delphi, and I made a mockup of the main screen:
Unclutter It mockup
My product name by then was “Unclutter It”. I changed it to “PC Desktop Cleaner”.
I choose Delphi because I wanted a small executable file, and no kind of frameworks, DLLs or nothing like that. I aimed for a light and fast application.
Learning Delphi was fast, but the IDE and the stiffness of the language was painful. Too many years of working in VB have spoiled me!.
January passed by and the advance wasn’t what I would have liked… I made the screens, made the configuration file, but the main file listview was difficult. I then rentACoded the main screen listview. A Russian programmer named Sergei did the work. I was not a brilliant work, but it stopped my struggle and gave me something to work on.
February and March were good months and by April 1st I started beta testing with my friends. I also rentACoded the logo and am very happy with the resulting Broom logo:
This week, (Apr 13) http://pcdesktopcleaner.com was officialy opened.
Selling the product won’t be easy there are several good applications with similar concepts (but not equal tough). But the main problem is not the competitors, is how to reach users.
My courses of action:
- Google organic search. My site is in the eight place for the obvious keywords. I plan to work around the other relevant keywords, at least to get first page with them also.
- Adwords. This will be a struggle. More on that on future posts.
- Forums. Must search forums related to the theme and post there. Also, must search for related conversations and post there.
Very difficult!. My goal for 2009 is selling 6 units. Let’s work!.
