Making money through the Appexchange

Just wanted to highlight a couple of paragraphs from David Claiborne's comment on my post yesterday:

Getting access to the half-million salesforce.com users makes AppExchange an attractive development target, but it is very difficult, as Gareth Davies noted, to get an actual sale from the AppExchange channel. As noted in this blog, salesforce.com demands a VERY STEEP price for access to its customer base via Dreamforce and other events.

My conclusion is that unless you have a $100,000 marketing budget for the first year, you will probably not see any return from an AppExchange product (unless you can sell your product/intellectual property to salesforce.com).

My impression, given that we have indeed spent close to $100,000 in cash with salesforce.com and probably as much in development and other marketing activities, Claiborne's assessment is right on the money....