Would there be a market for physics/chemistry web development tools?

[CrimpJiggler]

I've been making various PHP scripts that make it easier for me to build chemistry tutorials but I spend a lot of time making this software, so it would be cool if I could make some money in the process. Would you say people would pay for something like a chemistry tool wordpress plugin which will let you enter in a short BBCode, say for example [atom=Br2+ display=electron_configuration output=bohr_diagram] and it outputs a Bohr atom diagram for that particular ion. Thats just an example of one of the features I could add. Do you think people would pay for that?

 

[Adyssa]

There's one way to find out :P

I like these kinds of tools, it's often just the kind of tedious procedure nobody wants to do, but if you have a plugin that spits it out then why not? Do it I say. :)

 

[AlephZero]

Do some market research.

Find out how many wordpress blogs have (or could use) the diagrams you want to generate. Then make a guess at how many of those bloggers would pay money for your software.

Then think about what alternatives they have - e.g. just find a similar looking image on the web and link to it, or copy it.

Then consider what happens if you do get some customers, and they start asking for lots of features that you don't have...

Financially you might be better to go the opposite way: if your own blogs / tutorials look so much better than the alternatives, you get all the web traffic and all the advertising revenue it generates

 

[CrimpJiggler]

Thanks for all the advice. I'm going to wait until I'm finished college (a few months) before taking on any big projects, since I'm a professional programmer, my scripts get mighty complex and hard to debug, even little plugins are tricky because they have to be perfect.