What to sell on Zero to Hundred

You have software sitting in a folder: the starter you have rebuilt 3 times, the admin panel you wrote for yourself, half a business you shipped, ran for a while, and stopped charging for.

None of it is a business on its own. That is exactly why it is still sitting there. If you have already decided to list something and want the mechanics instead, how selling works end to end covers those.

It does not have to be a business to be worth selling. Licensing here is non-exclusive, so the same software can sell to more than one Buyer and you keep the copyright. So the question to ask is "can someone else run this?"

The short version:

• Software does not have to be finished to sell. It has to be runnable by someone who is not you.
• The strongest categories are the boring ones: starters, internal software, and the per-seat subscriptions companies would rather own outright.
• Because the license is non-exclusive, the same software can sell more than once.
• Building specifically to sell is a reasonable way to work. It does not have to be the thing you love.

What kinds of software sell?

Starters other Builders launch from

The scaffolding you rebuild every time you start something. Auth, billing, roles and permissions, an admin panel, transactional email, the deploy pipeline. You have written it more than once, which means everyone else has too.

A starter sells because the Buyer knows exactly what they are skipping: the first 100 hours, the part nobody enjoys and everybody pays for. It is the easiest category to describe honestly, because "here is the boilerplate, wired up and deployed" is a complete claim. You are selling a working base that someone else builds on.

Be specific about the stack. "Next.js starter" is a category. "Next.js 16, Postgres, Stripe subscriptions with proration handled, and a working invite-and-roles flow" is a listing.

Software that replaces a per-seat subscription

This is the largest gap and the least crowded.

Every company pays per seat, every month, for software it half uses: screen recording, team chat, form builders, scheduling links, status pages, time tracking, help desks, feature flags, and internal wikis.

Run the arithmetic from the Buyer's side. A 40-person company paying $12 a seat a month for a form builder spends about $5,760 a year, and $28,800 over 5, on software a competent Builder could write in a fortnight. $12 is a conservative figure for that list. Loom bills its Business plan at $18 per user per month. What they pay for is not having to build or host it.

For many of those companies, per-seat pricing stopped making sense a while ago. They have not moved because "build it ourselves" means hiring. Buying the source outright is the third option: pay once, host it, change the 2 things that never fit their process anyway.

Off-the-shelf subscriptions are built for the median customer. A Buyer who owns the source can add the one field their compliance team needs, or drop the 4 features they never touch. Buyers pick your version because they can make it theirs.

Narrow software for one industry

Think of dental practices, trucking dispatch, veterinary clinics, rental yards, church admin, or anything where the incumbent is a decade old, priced per seat, and hated.

Narrow software is a hard business to run because the market is small and the sales cycle is long. It is a good sale, for the same reason. The Buyer is often someone inside that industry who already has the relationships and cannot write the software. You can write the software. Selling them the source fills their gap.

Internal software you already run

The dashboard you built to watch your own metrics. The script that reconciles two systems nobody else connects. The onboarding flow you wrote because the off-the-shelf one did not fit.

Internal software has an advantage no side project has: it is in daily use, by real people, against real data. It usually needs an install guide and the removal of a few hard-coded values before anyone else can run it. That is about a day of work.

Software you build specifically to sell

Building for sale is a different brief from building a company, and it is a reasonable way to work.

You look for a well-understood problem with a clear scope and a stopping point. You ship it, sell it more than once because the license is non-exclusive, and move on without a roadmap or support you did not sign up for.

It may not be the software you are proudest of, and it does not need to be.

What makes any of it sell?

Four things matter more than the category.

A demo the Buyer can run. A working demo or a walkthrough video is required on every listing before it goes live, and it is the single strongest thing in your listing. Screenshots prove a design. A demo proves it runs.

An honest scope. Say what works and what does not. A limitation you disclose is information the Buyer prices in. A limitation they find after buying is grounds for a report. The listing that says "payments and auth are done, the reporting is basic, there are no tests" outsells the one that says "production-ready" and means it loosely.

A README someone else can follow. Install steps, environment variables, and how to run it locally. This is the most common reason good software does not sell, and it is an afternoon of work.

A price that reflects the hours the Buyer skips. They are paying to keep their own weekends.

Start with what already exists

Your first listing is usually software already on your drive. You stopped counting it because it was not a company.

Listing is free, and the license is non-exclusive, so listing it costs you nothing and does not stop you using it, selling it again, or building on it later.

Go and look in the folder.