Where to learn right skills for selling software product/service?

Question

Stackoverflow is really amazing. Last year when I joined the community was a little sceptical because there were already a lot of sites with similar content (although the concept wiki-forum is new to me) but it outpassed almost all (or just all) similar pages and the investment for the development in financial and technical sense probably wasn't as big as in some other business attempts which in the end fail inspite of great ideas behind.

Most of engineers focus on technology and look at the product from technical perspective. Recently I heard about some iPhone app (don't want to name it and offend anyone) which I would not invest a single minute for the development as I consider it useless and unethical but the guy who developed it made a fortune.

To make it short there are a lot of great ideas which fail and there are a lot of useless products which make big money (by the way don't get me wrong... I don't consider this site useless). Obviously there is a gap between the idea (or finished product) and selling and it would be really useful for engineers to achieve at least a bit of skills to promote their products.

I would be really thankful if anyone of you could suggest any good material to learn about business which would be useful to people who spend most of the time in research and development.

Answer 1

It's a different realm of knowledge, I guess. For one thing is to be able to create a wonderful thing and another is to make people believe it's so wonderful they have to buy it.

So the second thing is called marketing and is what you need to learn. The best place to learn that is a marketing school, I suppose.

But don't waste your time and money in an MBA.

Answer 2

Here are some useful links:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

http://www.oisv.com/

http://www.asp-shareware.org/

http://www.davetalks.com/

http://www.microisv.com/

http://www.sic.org/

Answer 3

I think one of the most important things to do is to just pay attention to why some businesses succeed and some fail. Even if you're wrong at first eventually you'll get better and it and you might come up with your own ideas considering the half-good ideas you observe. Everywhere I've worked I've tried to come up with ideas to make the business better and these days I'm pretty good at predicting what I think will succeed and what I think will fail. This skill will make you a better contributor to your company and your team if you work on it enough because you can provide real input based on your observations.

I'm not sure anyone can teach you to be good at this sort of thing but if you practice enough you'll develop your own style that will serve you well for a long time. If it turns out that you're bad at it then just listen to those who are good at it long enough and you'll get better.