Brian Plexico has a description of how he released a moderately successful product in just seven days.  This story, among others, helped convince me to actually take the plunge into the business.  I think the key here is a) finding an unfilled niche and b) targetting it aggressively.  If you are the sole source in the world for software to fill your need, and there are people who are actually hurt by that need, then people will be happy to pay you money to ease it for them.  It doesn’t matter if the need sounds trivial to people who don’t feel it, or whether another developer could do the same thing in their lunch break.  Well, OK, if you actually get to the profitable stage you have to worry about someone doing it on their lunch break and competing with you.  But its a wide, wide world out there and there are an embarassment of niches which have never caught the eye of somebody with rudimentary programming expertise.  Including, apparently, skeet shooting software.