Safe is Risky

Note: This was originally posted on the old site on May 21, 2003.

I've just finished reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin.  It is an excellent book.

One of his major points is "safe is risky". This is so true. Everybody wants to play it safe.

I see this all the time in the shareware community. New shareware people are always asking what types of applications sell the most. They only want to make what they think will sell the most. This is especially big in the shareware game arena. Everybody is looking to only make games of a type that they think will sell the most.

There's actually nothing wrong with this, but the problem is that the way people do it is to just make copies of successful programs. So many newcomers seem to believe that the key to success is to make a game just like some other successful game.

But the reason the original game was successful was probably because it was original. You won't be nearly as successful with a copy.

In order to be successful, you have to come up with something new and different. As Seth Godin says, you need something remarkable. Another file unzipping program is not remarkable. It doesn't matter if it can handle more types of files, or it's faster, or there's some great programmer reason why it's better than any previous zip utility. Nobody will care. Winzip already does what anybody needs.

A shareware application that is just like all the others will not be noticed. In order to stand out from the crowd, you have to be different from the crowd.

The number one rule of shareware marketing is make a product that is different.