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my"Sharewares"
Do you think I woke-up one morning thinking : "What about writting sharewares ?".
Well, kind of. In fact, it all started with "DamienLesPensees".
For years, I have been writing down quotes. All types: funny, serious, political, philosophical, cynical...
And then the shareware idea kicked in. : "a screen-saver !!!!!". But an intelligent one.
You are going to tell me Heidi Klum bouncing of your screen is quite pleasant indeed, and I would agree with you.
Nevertheless I thought my idea was worth a shot.
So I wrote it in VB after work. I spent most of my time typing quotes I have been writing down for year.
Anyway, one day, I was satisfied with the state of it and I sent it to my friends, hoping it would snowball.
You know, if a person receives it and forward it to 5 others and so on, I might buy Bill Gates a drink around the golf-club house one day ;-)
I was so optimistic and excited... I had an idea, I developped it, packaged it and how could it not work.
I am not going to say how many copies I sold because it is too embarassing (but thanks Stephanie G. anyway, much appreciated).
Ok I admit it failed miserably ! So what ?
Only people who do nothing do not make mistakes. But, as far as I was concerned, I was thrilled. People who indeed installed it loved it (I have a couple of email saying they loved it, I mean, not enough to buy it of course, but it had made them laught ).
I gave away too much actually. 75 quotes for free, the 325 others if you buy it.
I should have given 25 quotes... Anyway too late.
It has been a great experience. I have learned a lot from this.
First, great ideas exist everywhere. Everyone can have one. Now, making your idea successfull is quite a different matter isn't it ?
Second, screen-saver. Who would buy a screen-saver when you can download millions for free from the Internet ?
Ok, there are all dull (except SETI) but still.
Third, I failed on the diffusion of my idea. Have to think of a better media than my friends.
Shareware writing:
myFinances2000 - a personal finance logging to follow your expenses.
mySportLog2000 - for my personal logging of the sports you are doing.
mySleep2000 - we sleep almost a 1/3 of our life and we know nothing about. Sleep influences greatly on our day-time
capacity. That is where I got the idea of this spreadsheet (also from a book called "Sleep Less Live more", from Everett Mattlin. Don't bother looking for it, it is out-of-print. Try amazon.com, that's how I managed to find my copy).
The overall objective of this being to "take control" of your sleep and reduce your TST (Total Sleep Time as they call it in books). Politicians, business gurus, artists... sleep only a few hours a night. Can we all do that ? Yes we can. And myTaskSleep2000 helps. I managed to gain 1h per day using this technique. In a year I gained 2 free weeks !!!
