When I released PageFour, I broke the cardinal rule. I ‘d written a piece of software that I wanted to write, not a piece of software that the market wanted me to write.

How did this come about? Over the past six months I’ve read book after book on how to get a startup off the ground, visited every web-site I could find offering free advice to the emerging businessman, waded my way through one monotonous blog after another describing the trials and tribulations of one new software startup after another.

And everywhere I looked the message was the same: do the market research! You need to know that people are willing to buy your product before you design it; you need to know that they need and want your product; you need to know that by creating this new product you are fixing a problem or easing someone’s pain.

So I can’t claim that I didn’t know what I was doing. I listened to all the advice and like so many before me I convinced myself that yes, the market is there. It’s there because I want it to be there; it’s there because I’m part of the potential market and I use and love PageFour. Of course, saying it’s there because it’s there sounds just a little too schoolyard.

Is there a market for PageFour?

I believe there is. Granted, I may not be giving Microsoft a run for their money any time soon, but you don’t have to be the biggest and most successful company in the world to still be successful. You only have to be the best to a small number of people.

I designed PageFour for a very specific kind of user: writers. Remember typewriters? They allowed you to type words onto paper. They were used in offices, at universities, and by aspiring writers all over the world. No matter who the user was, the purpose of the tool was the same: to put words on paper.

Now we have computer software that duplicates the functionality of the typewriter - it allows you to put words on paper. But it does a whole lot more than that too: it lets you create tables and graphs, embed images into your pages, attach watermarks, insert macros and all sorts of other things that I don’t understand, all of which are great for business users who want to do some or many of these things.

But what if all you want to do is what you did with a typewriter ten years ago - put words on paper? As any writer will tell you, this is what it all comes down to - words matter; anything else is just fluff around the edges.

So PageFour gives you all the functionality of the larger word processors that writers want, and none of the business extras that the corporate world seems to love so much. The dictionary and thesaurus, the text and paragraph formatting, the snapshots and archiving, even the password protection are all there. But the tables and graphs, the macros and formulas, the menus within menus within menus, are nowhere to be found.

Everything is designed and written for writers. So yes, I believe PageFour is a commercial product and that there is a market for it in a Microsoft centric world.