Patrick McKenzie posted an excellent article about running a software business on 5 hours per week. One of the tricks, of course, is that the software should be criminally, insanely simple:

Bingo Card Creator has been memorably described as “Hello World attached to a random number generator.”  If anything, that probably overstates its complexity.  Customers do not care, though — they have problems and seek solutions, regardless of whether the solution required thousands of man years of talented engineers (Excel) or one guy working part-time for a week.  (You’ll note that you can make bingo cards in Excel, too.  Well, you could.  Many people can’t.  If I sell to them, I don’t necessarily have to sell to you.)

It's amazing how useful simple software can be. Or perhaps that's how simple useful software can be.

If you're writing a programming tutorial, build example apps that are both simple and useful (or fun).

My previous post about the Click Me Challenge fits here of course.

And nobody ever gets tired of title generators either. Despite being trivial, this Facebook Game Idea Generator was on the front page of Hacker News yesterday. Show people how to build these things.

What trivially simple software do you think can be useful or fun?