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fredstar · Apr 10, 2005, 10:46 AM

Hey guys,
Basically here is the deal, i love Macs and widget development has hardly taken off, i want to stimulate it with some financial incentive for you developers who have ADC membership and sdk's so we can all take full use of Dashboard. I am after developers who can make quality and useful widgets - there is a fair bit of money involved for you guys.
So, i am going to be selling a bunch of widgets for a v reasonable $10 or �6 or even less. I am going to be offering a healthy margin, of about 20-30% of the profits you developers will be getting out of it (depending on the amount of widgets you produce).
Ok so what i am offering you Developes:

-A possible initial 'signing on' amount to you guys after you develop the first few widgets for me - not sure how much it will be but it will be a fair amount

-20-30% of the profits depending on the number of the total widgets i sell, for example i am thinking of offering 20 high quality widgets for the fixed amount above and sell 1000 at �6, that is �6000.
If you have developed 5 of those 20 widgets, that works out as �300 per widget (�1200 for developing 5), which gives you 20% (or as much as 35%) of �1200 which is �240 - that is just if i get 1000 people to purchase them.
Now i am forecasting sales of nearer 10,000 as i have a lot of people interested, but we need to move quickly in order to catch a market.

So what you guys think?

Off the top of my head, widgets that can be localized - ie Yellow pages for each EU country, Ebay for each country and loads more, much more web cams across the world. The key is these widgets have to be graphically pleasing and of course useful and widgets people are actually going to use.
Freddie

galarneau · Apr 10, 2005, 12:49 PM

Originally posted by fredstar:
I am after developers who can make quality and useful widgets - there is a fair bit of money involved for you guys

<snip>

20-30% of the profits depending on the number of the total widgets i sell

<snip>

So what you guys think?

I think that if I had the ideas, skills, and motivation to make a great widget, I would just sell it myself for 100% of the profits instead of only getting 20-30% of the profits and giving the rest to a middleman.

What are you offering these developers you're after? Marketing? Web hosting? If a developer can make a widget, he can CERTAINLY make a web page to promote it.

Kristoff · Apr 10, 2005, 03:30 PM

Exactly.

I will make useful widgets---I might sell some, and I might GPL some.

But why in hell would I give them to you to profit from?

Diggory Laycock · Apr 11, 2005, 08:50 AM

1 - The reason that only a few widgets have been published is because: Tiger has not been released yet.

2 - You get 70 - 80 % of the profit - nice. ...For you.

3 - widgets are easy to write - any useful widget you charge for will quickly be offered for free by someone else.

20/30% - Jesus, what do you think we are? Musicians.

Kristoff · Apr 11, 2005, 04:04 PM

Bwaaaahahaha.....musicians!

That's rich.

More like those guys who sell oil paintings out of the back of their van in the Holiday Inn parking lot

galarneau · Apr 13, 2005, 01:07 PM

I'm actually surprised that people want to charge for widgets.

I mean, do you ever see people charging money for useful Applescript/Shell/Perl/Python scripts? I never have.

It will be interesting to see how things turn out.

If I did charge anything for a super-cool widget I made, it would only be $2-$3 anyway. Most likely free, though.

frankiec · Apr 14, 2005, 06:06 AM

Originally Posted by fredstar

developer's

The plural of "developer" is developers.

Originally Posted by fredstar

sdk's

The plural of "SDK" is SDKs.

Chuckit · Apr 14, 2005, 09:33 AM

Originally Posted by galarneau

I'm actually surprised that people want to charge for widgets.

I mean, do you ever see people charging money for useful Applescript/Shell/Perl/Python scripts? I never have.

That's because they're targeted at relative geeks. Your average consumer is much easier to wrangle money out of.

Quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with charging for a widget, or even a script. If you don't think it seems fair, you can make your own GPL version and show that it's actually a ripoff.

Detrius · Apr 14, 2005, 11:56 PM

Originally Posted by frankiec

The plural of "developer" is developers.

The plural of "SDK" is SDKs.

Wow, you really do have a LOT of useful input in these board's. I know I have learned a lot from the many comment's that you have made with respect to repairing permission's in the Mac O's forum. Have a nigh's day!

edoggie · 02:51 PM

I too am interested in have a widget developed for me and am just trying to get a cost estimate of what a Internet Driven widget would run?

Something along the lines of the VersionTracker widget?

Any comments?

-Eric

Wevah · May 6, 2005, 03:32 PM

(@ first post:)

Wow.

Just...wow.

frankiec · May 6, 2005, 05:11 PM

Originally Posted by Detrius

Wow, you really do have a LOT of useful input in these board's.

You probably mean "you really do have a LOT of useful input on these boards" -- right?

Just wanted to clarify, you know us anal, thin-skinned types.

TampaDeveloper · May 6, 2005, 11:43 PM

Well, I'm glad we've ripped the original poster to shreds. What if he had a distribution deal with Wal-Mart? haha... But yeah.. Usually the guy with the idea is the guy that makes the money... So, fredstar, give me your idea's for widgets and if you've got a signed contract with Best Buy, we'll talk... Else I'll quote you an hourly rate. It won't be pretty.

toffe · May 7, 2005, 08:15 AM

Personally i like the dashboard idea because it is a platform from where you can develop/distribute nice widgets that people enjoy and makes the world a better place.

Not a "Let's make some fast money out of this - NOW" kind of thing.

I'ts more fun to give away a program (like a widget) that's useful to others, than making others buy it. - A widget isn't that complex anyway, but cool and (can be) useful