Software Businesses with Hiten Shah

The software market changes every year.

As individuals and enterprises become more willing to buy software, there are new markets for entrepreneurs to sell software to. Good software has high margins and high retention, so even a niche software business can prove profitable.

As software spreads across the world, developing countries are showing a willingness to buy the same software tools as the developed countries, making the niche software businesses even more successful than expected.

It’s a great time to start a software business. But the fundamental challenges faced by an entrepreneur have not gone away. An entrepreneur must find the necessary capital, build an initial product, iterate on that product, market to their audience, sell to their customers, and retain their users.

Hiten Shah is an entrepreneur and investor who has started several businesses, both successful and unsuccessful. His latest company is called FYI which helps you find your documents in three clicks or less. He is also the host of the Startup Chat podcast, a show about strategies and tactics for software businesses. Hiten joins the show to discuss his experience in the software industry, including lessons on financing, product development, and the future of software products.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast.
• New Software Daily app for iOS. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe
• Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco.
• We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line.

Transcript

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