The potential products I’m trying to decide between are: (1) A multi-language ‘object monitoring’ utility kind of like Chrome’s object explorer with certain enhancements (2) An easy to use, and very flexible instructional algorithm visualization system (3) A ‘high-level’ algorithm debugger.

I believe (1) has the greatest profit potential, and fewer complexities on the business side—but will take more work than the others code-wise, and I’m about out of money and need to get a job soon.

(2) wouldn’t take much more work to have an alpha in order—but then I have to try selling to universities! I have no experience with this sort of thing at all. I’m unsure whether the profit potential is reasonable (i.e. whether they typically even have much money to spend; is it like Enterprise sales?), how rigid they are about adopting new software, whether they would even speak with me, or how I would initiate contact, etc.

I would use (3) personally, and it’s the reason I started the project, but after sharing the idea with a bunch of other programmers, I can’t see it catching on any time soon.

Any comments on which direction seems best are welcome, but I am particularly curious about what to expect if I were to follow the selling to universities route. Thanks!