Finding Software Distribution Partners?

lonesometrainer wonders: "We're a small software development shop and have been implementing Java, J2EE and recently .NET based solutions for our customers in Central Europe. I'm quite certain that most of our stuff would have been useful for at least some customers in the 'rest of the world' and localization wouldn't have been too difficult. Is there any internet platform out there where software development companies and potential distribution partners (e.g. ISVs) could meet?"

Do you have a website that showcases you

[discovercomics]

The internet allows yo to promote yourself and your solutions to the entire planet. Build a website and tell me what yo do and why I would want ot use your services.

Handle the collection of money and do downloads.

[Futurepower(R)]

I suggest that Slashdot readers not comment on stories in which they have very little interest. I also suggest that readers should not assume that Slashdot stories are ignorant, and supply an easy answer.

The Slashdot story author wants to find a company who will handle the collection of money and do the downloads. It is not easy to find such a company who will handle multiple currencies without error. For example, I have had considerable troubles with Digital River [digitalriver.com].

Re:Handle the collection of money and do downloads

[ggambett]

I have overwhelmingly good experience with Plimus [plimus.com], we use them as our main payment processor. No downtime, very few problems, and insanely fast tech support - they always reply within a couple of hours, they even add minor features you request in a matter of days.

I'm in no way affiliated with them, they're just very good, so they deserve the free publicity.

Plain webpage is not sufficient

[lonesometrainer]

Hi and thanks for the reply,

of course we do have a website, but the plain WWW is by far too generic, promoting yourself, your software is an extremely time-consuming job. We've got a very specific purpose here, small development team looking for software distribution partner.

There's probably 500.000 ISVs out there, of which only 0.01% might be interested in selling our stuff. Finding these 5 companies via a regular webpage is nearly impossible.

That's why specific platforms for e-procurement, quake 3 disc

Re:Plain webpage is not sufficient

[AuMatar]

There's probably 500.000 ISVs out there, of which only 0.01% might be interested in selling our stuff. Finding these 5 companies via a regular webpage is nearly impossible.

Thats to be expected. I mean would you sell stuff made by engineers who can't correctly calculate .01% of 500,000?

Re:Plain webpage is not sufficient

[hdparm]

Oh, c'mon already. Give us the url, we won't consider it a plug. :o)

Yes, there is

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are looking for is something called an "open relay".

What about trade shows?

[PornMaster]

I'd think that getting a booth in a trade show in London would give you European and some American exposure...

And have you spoken to representatives from Sun or Microsoft? I'm sure that both have opportunities to help you match up your products with people looking for solutions on their own platform with people looking for that type of solution.

Re:What about trade shows?

[Anonymous Coward]

i like this answer. surely the apps you have written are specific to a certain industry? While you may not even get a booth(cost) you could certainly find other ISV's that have booths and are targeting the particular industry your solution helps ,and contact them through this venue?

hire salesmen

[bluGill]

Sales is clearly not something you understand. So hire someone who has done international sales. There are plenty of people out there who can drive this market.

Finding a salesmen you trust to sell your product without giving you a bad name is left as an exercise for the reader. Good luck, this can be hard.

Are you sure it is worth selling internationally? Sometimes a business is better off with less customers. The costs of selling and supporting your product internationally may be more than what you can make from it. It doesn't cost much to send a guy to a customer in your city to get your stuff working. It costs a lot of money to send someone to a different continent.

Past experience

[Spudley]

A company I used to work for has been through exactly the same process over the last few years. I'm a programmer, so I wasn't directly involved in the process, but I'll tell you what I know.

The first thing to say is that we had a number of false starts before we got going. We had a couple of companies in Germany and elsewhere that we were talking to for a long time, but they didn't work out.

They do now, however, have three overseas distributors, in very different places around the world.

The first thing that they did was they hired a marketing specialist specifically for the task of finding the partners. She started off by researching which countries would have the best market for the product. This includes both the size of the market for our software in each country, as well as how similarly that country operates compared to our home market (the software deals contracts and so on, and needs to comply with local laws, so to break into some countries would need a lot of software changes, whereas in others the software could be used almost unchanged apart from translation)

Having identified a number of countries, she then researched the software market in those countries, looking at both producers and resellers. She was specifically looking for software companies with existing links in our market sector, as they would already have a good base of contacts to sell into.

Once she'd located a range of companies that matched her criteria, she wrote letters to them all (and had them translated professionally where necessary).

The software was already fully translateable, so once we had found our resellers, we only had to ship them the existing packages, and it was their task to do all the necessary translations for themselves. When they require software changes to suit the local market (or when they spot bugs!), they have access to our internal error logging system, and they can take a copy of our daily builds as well for testing purposes.

Just to give you an idea of the sorts of companies that we are dealing with:
All three resellers were different: One was a software company who was already selling a product that competed directly with ours, but who were looking to replace it with newer technology; the second was a marketing firm with no real knowledge of our market, but who had been approached by a company local to them to find a package they could use; and the third was a company selling a local accounting package, and they integrated our software with their own to help themselves break into a new market sector.

I hope that helps. I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's experiences of similar situations.