Hi Kym,
Thanks very much for taking the time to share your thoughts! I very much appreciate it, and certainly your idea of throwing the words “Signup Genius” into some text, and pitching my plugins as an alternative, is a very good idea. There are other signup type plugins out there already, and there seems to be a pretty good event calendar plugin made by the same developers who do a commercial Event Manager plugin, which seems to be doing pretty well. So, there is definitely some competition. In fact, as mentioned elsewhere, my own Sign Ups plugin started its life as another plugin at WordPress.org, simply called Sign Up Sheets (still active), and they had their own “pro” version.
As far as plugins that sell, the WooCommerce extensions I have created sell far more than the extensions for any of the “PTA” plugins… but, even those don’t sell enough to justify the time I put into them. However, at least those plugins work as a form of “advertising” and have been responsible for me landing several quite large custom programming projects.
Unless I get super busy again with custom jobs, I’ll probably end up doing it, because I do somewhat enjoy the “puzzle” aspect of putting something like this together… although, then I’m bringing a whole bunch of extra support work my way, which I don’t really enjoy so much (and takes up WAY too much of my time).
I’m certainly open to any type of marketing suggestions, even if it involves commissions to have other people help me license it to organizations. To do it right, though, I basically have to start from scratch and rework the whole database structure, and get it much more object oriented and easier to maintain. So, I don’t see this happening before spring or summer at the earliest. But, still not 100% sure it’s the right use of my time at this point.