Jabarri: About Jabarri

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You've just graduated college with a B.S. in Computer Science or Software Engineering. In your mind, the next step is to start sending out those resumes (if you haven't been doing so already). Chances are, you'll start out doing web development or contributing to a proprietary piece of Microsoft Windows software that's been years in development. Also, being at the bottom of the ladder, you're the first to go when downsizing happens.

Another option is to take those skills that you have and create your first piece of software as a professional software engineer. Chances are that sometime during your academic career you have already started working on a few concepts, or maybe even completed one. There is a huge market for nearly every kind of software. See for yourself, try a google search on any software genre to see how many e-commerce sites are selling their software online.

So you have your software, now the next thing to do is make it available for purchase. There are two roads you can take, either try to get your software on the shelves of Comp USA (or any other software retail store), or sell it through a web store. For you, the just out of college, one-man development team, the web store seems like the most logical approach.

Creating a web store involves a combination of skill, time and money. Skill in developing the site, time in getting the site to rank top 10 in the search engines, and money in advertising. For the one-man team, this can be exhausting mentally and financially. Luckily, there is an easier way.

For some time now, there have been "software marketplace" web sites that allow software authors to share their products with software buyers. These sites operate solely to provide income for you and low-cost products for consumers. Generally, a software marketplace will charge a commission on the purchase price of your product. It is usually a modest fee between 10 - 20%.

Jabarri.com is a relatively new software marketplace that aims to fill in the gaps that other software marketplaces leave open. A few such gaps are bug reporting, feature requests, product versions and bulk licensing. While most software marketplaces offer some of the services, it is difficult to find one that has them all. Jabarri.com also has one of the lowest sales commissions in the industry, 10%.

If you haven't yet settled on an idea for a software product, you might try the web development industry. If you have any experience with Java, ColdFusion, PHP, Zope or ASP, you might try creating components for these languages that would be useful for other developers. These components are often developed in a very short amount of time and are easy to install and use, so they are attractive to the developer and end-user alike. Of course, there is a lucrative market in many other software categories as well. Remember that you are working for yourself, you decide which language to use, which problem to solve, and last but not least, what price to sell your product for!