10 Simple Software Ideas That Made Their Creators Millionaires

Self-made millionaires ambitious, creative and outside the box thinkers. They have turned simple software ideas to develop and built an industry. Simple software ideas have made their creators millions include the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, AddressTwo, and more.

Building a million dollar business does not take great amounts of money. Several started out in humble circumstances and turned their ideas into something of value to make our lives better.

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Simple Software Ideas to Develop

AddressTwo

Nick Carter was hired to build a customer relationship management (CRM) for a client – this is how AddressTwo was born.

AddressTwo started in 2005. After using Act, Salesforce.com and Goldmine – Nick knew that a user friendly and simple CRM was needed. Nick’s program contained marketing via email platforms and showed marketers how to format usable lists of email addresses.

Nick Carter released his software as a beta in June 2008 and now it has over 5000 users. Nick is not a software engineer, he is a marketing professional. His users are marketing professionals who need good and easy ways to control contacts. Nick is now worth over $2 million from simple software ideas.

Asana

Asana is a productivity startup company co-founded by Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin was a co-founder of Facebook. Moskovitz paid $9000 for asana.com in 2009. It is helping people work tougher without all the meetings, emails and communications that overpower us all.

Asana’s takes parts and connects everyone working on a project with what’s going on. Asana’s simple software ideas turned into a program that improves the productivity of individuals and groups to increase the output. Asana is trending at over $2 million and Dustin’s $9000 investment has worked out well.

WordPress

Matthew Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, is worth over $250 million. Matthew created one of the best web platforms on the web.

WordPress is an open source blogging platform based on PHP and MYSQL. Using plug-ins, WordPress allows users and developers to extend web ability beyond normal features.

World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Berner- Lee wrote the first web client server in 1990 and URLs, HTTP and HTML were refined as computers improved in speed and availability.

Berners-Lee is the Director of the W3C that develops inter-operable technologies with specifications, guidelines, software, and tools.

“Weaving the Web” is a must read book written by Berner-Lee. It was written for software and hardware developers. With hard work and a simple software ideas to develop, the World Wide Web is now an essential part of every individual and business life.

Google

Sergy Brin and Larry Page are co-founders of Google. Google changed the way we found web pages.

As a research project at Stanford, Page and Brin created a search engine that showed results according to keywords and popularity. They felt the most popular search results would be the most useful. After raising money from family, friends and other investors. Page and Brin began Google in 1998. It is now the worlds most popular search engine. “Google” is now a verb listed in Webster’s Dictionary.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP. PHP is an open source, service side scripting language designed for Web development. PHP helps produce dynamic web pages.

Rasmus, born in 1968, created PHP or Personal Home Page (now Hypertext Preprocessor). He created a set of CGI binaries, written in the C programming language. This language was developed as personal code to display Rasmus’ resume and record his web page traffic.

PHP is known as a general purpose scripting language that runs on a web server and is open source, which means PHP is free of charge. The PHP Group provides the complete source code for users to customize for their own use.

Rasmus’ ideas that came from a simple need to keep his own personal pages and resume under control is now one of the most used features in computing, transferring pages, and reading HTML code.

Amazon

In 1994 Jeff Bezos saw the possibility of using Internet to sell books. Users were just beginning Internet usage for ecommcerce. Taking electronic lists of goods from major companies, Bezos compiled lists in a central location, developed a search system, and Amazon was born.

Bezos quit his lucrative Wall Street job and moved to Seattle. Bezos is worth billions and Amazon is the most well known online company. Amazon and Jeff Bezos are involved in business models, e-commerce, affiliate marketing and just about every web-available purchase.

LivingSocial

Living Social began as “Buy a Friend a Drink” and is now an online-bargain site. Tim O’Shaughnessy and Eddie Frederick founded LivingSocial in 2008 and today they are worth over $45 million each.

LivingSocial is a daily coupon industry. It teams up with restaurants, spas, gyms and educational sites to offer subscribers deep discounts on good and services. Coupons come as a daily email.

O’Shaughnessy originally worked for Revolution Health and developed apps for Facebook. Early success of these apps provided LivingSocial with a million in financing and the company began to shift directions. The premise of LivingSocial is to offer discounts and convert them into a full priced customer. Establishments that sign up with LivingSocial pay the company 30 percent of the fees they take in.

LivingSocial offers incentives for its 85 million users to advertise via word of mouth. Send your friends the link and if your referrals purchase off your link, your purchase is absolutely free.

Firefox

Blake Ross born in 1985 is best known for his work on the Mozilla web browser. Ross is currently worth $150 million and is currently the product manager at Facebook. It is open source and a popular browser.

Firefox uses the Gecko layout to render web pages. Firefox does adhere to all anticipated web standards. October of 2012 statistics reported that approximately 25% of the worldwide web uses Firebox. This makes it the second or third most widely used web browser. There are over 450 million users around the world and Firebox is very popular in Germany and Poland.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is a computer programmer and internet entrepreneur, his personal net work is about $9.4 billion and rising. Zuckerberg began writing software as a hobby in middle school.

As a student at Harvard (he never graduated) Zuckerberg wrote a social media application called Facesmash that gave students on the Harvard college campus social sites to vote on the attractiveness of other students. It was quickly shut down and Zuckerberg was disciplined.

Mark Zuckerberg now had the basis for Facebook. He wrote Facebook from his dormitory room. It was named “Facebook” in honor of The Facebook – an address book used in Zuckerberg’s private school. With success at Harvard as a model, Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz took the platform to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia and other ivy leagues colleges to tap into their social media networks.

Facebook originally only allowed college users is now an open information platform for users of every type and community.

If you can develop and be the sole investor in multi-functioning software platforms you will have the right to sell, distribute and produce your own proprietary software. Computer design and software expansion provides an open invitation for savvy software programmers and developers to become the next millionaires.