We just finished 3 hectic days at TechCrunch Disrupt – for those who are not in the know, TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the biggest startup events in the world. For 3 days we were pitching conference attendants about Binpress – investors, potential partners and users (we got to meet some of you in the flesh!).

It has been very tiring but worth it, we connected with a lot of people who hopefully will help us make Binpress bigger and better. Our belief that Binpress is going to be huge real soon has never been stronger – watch this space for further developments.
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After our best month yet in August, we are gearing up for some special goodness this coming month. Here are some of the main upcoming events we have planned:

Supercharged Mobile Development Contest

As we mentioned in our latest newsletter, we have a massive mobile development contest coming up. We had a programming contest when we first launched, which was a major success, and we are looking to start a tradition of contests to inject some competitive spirit and awesome prizes for our community.

The theme this time will be mobile development – with prizes going for the best submissions of a component for a mobile platform (iOS, Android, Windows Phone). We have some huge sponsors from the mobile development world providing relevant and worthy prizes.
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In our last post, Estimating The Potential Of Your Software Product we discussed ways to tell if your component idea is any good. In this post we want to go a step backwards and help you come up with good ideas for components you can sell on Binpress.

The first step should be to check out our idea suggestion section. This is where actual buyers from the Binpress community can request components they need and are willing to pay for. I used it to request a Tag cloud generator for PHP, which I bought as soon as it was ready after a quick revision request from it’s author, Andrius Virbicianskas. I will be posting a case study about this component in the near future, make sure to subscribe to be notified when it’s published.
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A common concern many of our developers have is knowing whether or not their components will sell well on Binpress. While it’s hard to predict and there are always outliers, there are some indicators you can use to get a better idea of what to expect.

We wrote this post mainly for our developer, but it should apply to anyone selling digital products – from PC Software to iPhone apps.

Step 1: Estimating value and need

The first thing you need to evaluate is whether there’s a need for your component, and whether it is worth the price you’re asking for it. In order to do that, ask yourself the following questions:
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Open-source software is an amazing accomplishment. It is proof of what can be achieved through collaboration and sharing, without any monetary incentive. Open-source projects such as Linux (the most widespread operating system for web servers and a viable competitor to Windows, the flagship of commercial software), and MySQL (one of the most popular database engines in use today) are incredibly useful and solve a major problem – while being distributed completely free with the source available for whoever wishes to see it.

Here at Binpress we use both of those products – in addition to several other amazing open-source products – PHP, nginx, the Zend Framework, jQuery and the list goes on. We *get* open-source, and have contributed in the past to several projects.

And yet, we promote the distribution of commercial source-code in addition to free, open source-code on our service.

We get the following comment a lot -

Your project looks cool … the only thing I have a problem with is the fact that you sell the code instead of open-sourcing it

Is there a contradiction here? are open-source and commercial software at odds with each other? we firmly believe that it’s quite the opposite. In fact, I’m here to tell you that open-source and commercial software complement each other and cannot exist without one another.
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What do you do when the sales of your software does not meet your expectations? Especially when it’s your first commercial product and you have no previous experience selling software?

In the past months we’ve noticed a phenomenon repeating itself with Binpress developers, which I like to call ‘The Price Lowering Syndrome’, and I’m sure happens with developers selling software everywhere. Whether its an online service, or a mobile app in the app store, what happens is really simple:

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