"App store" type environments
Hi all, brand new here and seems like a friendly place, so thought I'd drop by. I'm considering working on some kind of evening / weekend project that can hopefully earn a bit of cash, and am particularly looking at app store type environments - I'm aware they're not as profitable in the sense they often take a heavy cut, but I'd be prepared to take this considering I wouldn't need to worry about any underlying infrastructure.
Obviously the Play store and the Apple app store are the two most famous contenders, but they seem pretty saturated these days. I wondered if a better option might be the CRM space and took a look at the Salesforce App Exchange, but they want nearly $3k just to get listed - way too much of an upfront investment for something I'm not sure will necessarily be successful!
Are there any other similar environments that anyone could recommend?
There are quite a few! Do you listen to the IH podcast? This recent episode was about WordPress plugins:
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/063-katie-keith-of-barn2-media
Shopify has a marketplace, both for themes and code plugins. What's that app called that allows you to connect tons of random services and APIs together? They have a market as well.
Edit It's Zapier
https://zapier.com/page/partner-kit/#what-value-does-zapier-bring-to-my-company-
Thanks, that's very helpful! I had seen Shopify's offering, but it doesn't really fulfil my requirement of no external infrastructure (I think from my research it requires Heroku as a backend.)
Taken a look at that podcast though and that makes for very interesting listening!
Ah right. And I might've been wrong about Zapier, it was a little unclear. But yeah, no infrastructure would be pretty awesome, so WP seems like a good option for that.
The cool thing is, if you're willing to put in the time, you can find very active communities that are very open about what they need, and are open to being marketed to. And it's generally b2b (in that ep I linked to, I think they suggested going after b2b) which means they'll pay money if it solves a problem, because that generally means it's making their business more profitable.
Yeah, the B2B space (especially the subscription based B2B space) seems like a good place to be, and if I can end up there with no infrastructure costs / maintenance then fantastic! Salesforce seemed like a very good play here, as it offers all of the above - but the upfront cost is just way too high.
Thanks, I'll add that to my list!