Below are some categorised links that I think might be useful to developers and marketers of commercial software in general, and microISVs/indie developers in particular. I intend to update it from time-to-time.
Last update: Apr-2018
FAQ
Q. I’ve written this great article. Will you add a link to it if I email you?
A. No.
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Backups
- How good are your backups?
- jwz – PSA: backups
- Sometimes the best way to recover Windows data is Linux
- Your harddisk *will* fail – it is just a matter of when
Books
- 30 books everyone in software business should read (and why)
- recommended software marketing books
- software marketing book club
- successfulsoftware.net reading list
Development
- 30 tips for creating great software releases
- Buyer’s guide to development outsourcing
- Dealing with feature requests
- How much code can a coder code?
- Optimising your application
- Programming in flares
- Programming with your feet
- Static code analysis
- What technology should my start-up use?
- Using defence in depth to produce high quality software
Beta testing
- Running a successful beta – trickle effect and phone feedback
- How To Run A Beta Test… Or Not?
- Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test
- SaaS: Where To Find Your First 2,000 Beta Signups
C++
Mac OS X
- How to sign your Mac OS X App for Gatekeeper
- Mac App Store submission
- Releasing outside the app store
- Using a Mac Mini for development
Testing
Windows
Digital certificates
Ecommerce
- 3 factors that have impact on Conversion Rate
Coupons
Cross-selling, bundling and up-selling
Ecommerce providers
FAQ
Forums
Hosting
Icons
Ideas – how to find and evaluate them
- 12 ways to fail at commercial software
- Checklist for Picking the Best SaaS Idea
- Create products that people love by validating your idea first
- Does the world *really* need yet another Twitter client, RSS reader, ToDo list or backup application?
- Evaluating software product ideas
- Finding great ideas for your startup
- How to Evaluate Your Startup Idea Part 1: The Basics
- How to get startup ideas
- How I interview customers
- Ideas for Startups
- Lessons learnt form 13 failed software products
- Organic startup ideas
- Your Product is Bullshit and you’re Going to Fail if you Don’t Ask Users to Pay
Licensing/registration
- Best way to limit a trial version?
- Considering product activation?
- Everything You Need To Know About Registration Systems
- Software Time Trials
- The 10 Most Tempting Software Startup Categories
- What type of free trial should I offer for my software?
Marketing/Sales
- 10 questions to ask before you write a single line of code
- 100 ways to increase your software sales
- Bending over: How to sell your software to large companies
- Choosing a market for your software
- Clarify your story
- Don’t launch your product
- Engineering as marketing
- Enterprise sales for hackers
- Find Your Business Niche
- Getting customer feedback
- Google Website Optimizer – 108 Free Tips
- How do I sell a general-purpose tool?
- How do you create a product people want to buy?
- How (not) to sell your indie iOS game
- How to launch anything
- How To Launch a Mac App and Become #1 Top Paid App Globally
- How to sell more stuff to your existing customers
- How to sell your software for $20,000
- iPhone app store economics
- It’s OK not to have a social media strategy (really)
- Launching Software Products: Niche vs. Mass Market
- Lean Startup: Look Before You Leap
- Mac Developers Survey (2016)
- Meet me at the corner of Product and Market – or else!
- Mobile app marketing problems
- Mobile Apps: HTML5 vs Native
- Most startups should be deer hunters
- noob-guide-to-marketing-infographic
- Not disruptive, and proud of it
- Opt-in or Opt-out?
- Positioning Your Application is Smart Software Marketing
- Practical guides by inform.ly
- Should you offer a money back guarantee?
- Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches
- The art, science and ethics of box shots
- The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
- The very most basic things your company needs to know about sales
- The Truth About Abs: How To Make $1,000,000 Profit Per Month with Digital Products
- Trialpay results
- Uninstall surveys
- What is google analytics?
- Why Making Something Customers Want Isn’t Enough
- You have 30 days to win a customer
Awards
Blackberry
Market research
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- 15 Ways To Find 10 People Who Will Pay For Your Product [Idea]
- 95 Ways to find your first customers for customer development or your first sale
- How to create a million dollar business this weekend
- Talking to Customers: What a Concept
- You want more than product/market fit
- Your Market is Smaller Than You Think
Pricing
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- Calculating volume discounts
- Camels and Rubber Duckies – Joel on Software
- Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp
- Does the freemium model work?
- Finding the Right Price – Marketing Mobile Software – Part II, Price
- Four Pricing Principles to Never Forget
- Free eBook
- How do I raise prices?
- How I increased sales 50% by adding extra price points
- How to Price your SaaS Application – The Definitive Guide
- How Perfect Pricing got me 1500 Sales in 2 Days
- iPad App Pricing
- More money from fewer sales
- Odd Pricing (.95) vs Rounded Pricing
- Pay-What-You-Want Birthday Sale Results
- Price table design 1
- Price table design 2
- Pricing Psychology: 10 Timeless Strategies to Increase Sales
- The Business of Pricing Your Product
- Your Product is Free Because You’re Lazy and Scared
- Why free plans don’t work
Promotion
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- 35 Lead Generation Ideas for Your Online Business
- Promoting your software (part 1)
- Promoting your software through 1-day sales and bundles
- Selling your software in retail stores (all that glitters is not gold)
- The Power of Promotion – Marketing Mobile Software – Part III, Promotion
- How do I get my first few customers?
- How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
- How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide
- The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs
- The how not to guide to public relations
Advertising
- How do I know where to advertise?
- Jedi Mind Tricks: How to Get $250,000 of Advertising for $10,000
- The 5 Minute Guide To Cheap Startup Advertising
Affiliates
Banner ads
Facebook
Pay per click (inc Adwords)
- 5 great ways to waste money in Google Adwords
- A test of cost-per-actions vs cost-per-click in Google Adwords
- Advertising your software on Facebook
- Adword rot
- Find the right keywords
- Keyword research
- Linkedin advertising experiment
- Optimize at your own peril
- Paid Search Marketing Tips For Software Vendors
- Setting an optimal bid price for Google CPA bids
- The 9 Step Guide to Get Some Structure Into Your PPC Life
- Tips for Advertising on the Content Network
- Remarketing – does it work?
- Using AdWords Dynamic Parameters in Links
- Using remarketing to sell more software
Ads
Negative keywords
Pinterest
PR
SEO
- 15 minute SEO
- 58 Resources to Help You Learn and Master SEO
- A Few Good Links – Why you need them and how to get them
- Are You Making These 11 SEO Mistakes With Your Website?
- Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Single Page Version
- Breaking Google’s Glass Ceiling with a Microsite
- FollowSteph.com – 12 Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) You Should Always Do
- Google ranking factors
- How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts
- How to do keyword research
- How to measure SEO efforts
- HTTPS and SEO
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google’s SEO Starter Guide
- SEO Best Practices – Correlation Testing : Natural Search Blog
- SEO Cheat Sheet: 15 Common Oversights Found During Site Audits
- SEO freelancers compare their favourite tools
- The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You: MicroISV on a Shoestring
- The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website
- Why You Shouldn’t Pay Any SEO You Can Afford: MicroISV on a Shoestring
- SEO for Software Companies
- The giant list of keyword tools
Twitter
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Partnerships
Resellers
Upgrades
Website
- 5 Easy to Use Tools to Effectively Find and Remove Stolen Content
- Cookie tracking for profit and pleasure
- Heatmaps from Clicks: How Crazyegg improved our website overnight
- How to diagnose your traffic drop
- How to Survive Your Website Getting Hit With a Denial of Service Attack
- Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared
- Tagline Blues: What’s the Site About? (Alertbox)
- The importance of targeted website traffic
- Useful Value Proposition Examples (and How to Create a Good One)
A/B testing
- 10 A/B testing tools for small businesses
- 100 Conversion Optimization Case Studies
- A/B test duration calculator (Excel spreadsheet)
- ABtests.com
- Google Website Optimizer Case Study: Daily Burn, 20%+ Improvement
- The art of testing
Calls to action
Design
- Advanced Website Optimization – Making your Site Faster
- Revisiting “The Fold”
- Six easy changes to makeover your website
- The highest ROI way to increase signups: Make a minimal homepage
- The “ugly” truth
- Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners
- Where the best designers go to find photos and graphics
Domains
- How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts
- How to Buy Domain Names Like a Pro: 10 Tips from the Founder of PhoneTag.com
- How to choose the right domain name
- How to find a good domain name
- So your domain has been stolen. What now?
- Wayne Rooney and a decade of .uk domain name disputes
Landing pages
- 15 Landing Page Ideas
- From Minimum Viable Product to Building A Landing Page
- How We Improved Our Conversion Rate by 72%
- Landing Pages That Conver
- Landing Pages Turn Traffic Into Money
- Long Copy vs. Short Copy Tested
- The Landing Page Optimization Guide You Wish You’ve Always Had
Metrics
Miscellaneous
- 7 Lessons I Learned from Interviewing 45 Amazing Entrepreneurs
- 9 Deadliest Start-up Sins
- 9 Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company
- 10 mistakes microISVs make
- 24 things to do, and 100 things *not* to do (yet) for building a MicroISV
- 25 steps for building a Micro-ISV
- 39 step product launch checklist
- A to Z: 200 Essential Resources for Entrepreneurs Building a Business
- Awesome Indie – Resources to help independent developers make money
- Bootstrapping a software product
- Buying a lean, mean, compiling machine
- Competition
- Google Alerts for software vendors
- Hiring your first employee (UK)
- How much money will my software make (and what has that got to do with aliens)?
- How to make money online
- How to take screenshots correctly: some practical tips
- If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough
- Outsourcing artwork through 99designs
- Running a microISV
- Selling your own software vs working for the man
- Setting up an office for a software company
- Shareware Amateurs vs. Shareware Professionals
- Startup launch checklist
- Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month
- The Do’s and Don’ts of Shareware, Part 1 – O’Reilly Media
- Tips on travelling with a laptop
- VAT basics for software vendors
- What Startups Are Really Like
- When should you kill a product?
- Why bootstrapping was the only logical choice
- Why you will always think your product is shit
Naming
- What’s in a name – Tips for naming your startup
- Choosing A Software Name: Top Ten Tips for Naming Software
- Crowdsourcing Your Product Name
- How to find a great software product name
- How to name software product line editions
- Lousy Products Might Break Your Bones – But A Name Will Seldom Hurt You
- Finding a great startup domain name
- Naming a business
- Naming your startup: Settle down, it’s cool!
- The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Names
- Namegen tool
Piracy
- How to remove software cracks and keygens from file hosting sites
- Interview with a cracker
- Software piracy
- Why you should create a ‘honeypot’ page
Support
- 33 tips for giving great technical support at a small software company without being swamped
- How to Win At Whac-a-Mole: The Secret To Truly Sustainable Support
- How we grew our startup by providing awesom support
- If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support
- Creating a forum
Usability
- 7 rules for creating gorgeous UI
- 10 things non-technical users don’t understand about your software
- Seeing your software through your customers’ eyes
- The other side of the interface
- Unskilled and unaware of it
- User experience myths
- Why You Must Solve the First User Experience, First
Successful Software 
