The thing to avoid is to blaze ahead with a great product, since as a technical type youll likely make something that you wish you had, rather than something that the average Joe wishes they had, and you will go out of business with lack of sales since the number of people who want the neat thing you wish you had (and are willing to pay for it since they need it and cant make it themselves) is actually very low. Step 0: Figure out who you want your customer to be Step 1: Ask yourself to list what pains the customer is in without your product. Make sure you are answering a "top 3 pains of the customer" issue if your product does not answer a top three pains issue for the prospective customer your product is likely not worth developing. Step 2: Figure out bottoms up how you will get it to market, NOT top down like "the market is X big and I can capture Y percent of X", Top down never works. If you have a bottoms up plan of "tuesday I will give a copy to X, and upload it to Y, then etc etc" then you have a chance. Step 3: make a working prototype Step 4: start a C corp, make sure it owns the program, copyrights, patents, etc Step 5: show your prototype to a VC if you need lots of money - they will take 20% of your shares no matter how little or much money they give you so try to get as far ahead as possible on your own Step 6: hire a bunch of outsourced programmers to do the grunt work, you manage them and write only key code yourself, unless your project is very small Step 7: sell your corporate shares and retire young.

Ok, so I'm ready to start marketing and selling what I think is a killer niche engineering app. The problem is I don't know how to actually set up the mechanics of selling it on a site! Can anyone help? Basic situation: Ive got a windows app ready for distribution and sales its got an installer, a ftp site that it gets updates for itself, etc now what is the easiest way to set up a store? i.e. how do i get a "pay $25 with your credit card to download my app button" with credit card payment processing/ftp download etc? -M