Writing software is the easy part; turning it into a business that pays the bills is where the bruises come from.
After some scars and some small wins, here are the lessons from the trenches of software as a business, shared while the iPad craze is fresh, Google Instant just changed search habits, and the app gold rush is loud enough to drown careful thinking.
First lesson; get paid for something real before you chase a feature tour that nobody asked for, because revenue is the only user signal that never lies. A handful of painful interviews beats a thousand downloads, so sit next to people and watch how they fumble your onboarding, where they stall, and what they try to do that your product silently blocks, then rewrite the first time experience until a new user can reach the aha moment in minutes not days. Free is tempting and press friendly, but free fills your inbox with hobby requests and little urgency, so start with a small price and a clear value meter, even if it is just ten bucks for peace of mind or for saved time that a manager can defend in a budget meeting. Do not let your loudest user pick your roadmap; let your paying cohort pick it by behavior, by expansion, and by churn, and promote the patterns that keep the lights on. Blog early with real stories and searchable answers to common pains, because with Google Instant out there nudging queries mid flight, your best search bet is a library of useful posts that match the long questions people actually type. Skip launch parties and build a simple email trail from day one; a welcome note with a short video, a day two tip, a day seven nudge, and a day fourteen invite to a short call will rescue more accounts than a glossy promo ever will.
The second lesson is money mechanics, because pricing is product design in disguise, and small knobs moved today decide who you sell to tomorrow. Set a value metric that grows with the customer but does not punish them for success in silly ways, so charge by projects, seats, or tracked contacts, not by storage bytes that nobody wants to think about, and then anchor plans that tell a story; a basic plan for a solo maker, a standard plan for a small team, and a business plan for a manager who needs controls more than features. Do trials that end, not endless free, and collect a card at signup not at the last minute, because a card on file turns activation into a clear yes or no and lets you learn from that line, and if you worry about scaring people off, remember that unqualified signups are not a gift. Watch the simple math every week; new monthly recurring revenue, upgrades, downgrades, and churn, and keep a whiteboard with those four numbers in big letters, because one number going the wrong way will tell you where to focus before it becomes a blog post about your product�s fall. Treat support as marketing in plain clothes; fast helpful replies with real names make customers talk, and the best copy you will ever write comes from the words they use in those threads, so paste those phrases into your site and your emails. Finally, remove friction from billing; keep invoices human readable, let customers change plans without writing to you, and make refunds painless, because trust built at the cash register is the cheapest growth channel you will ever find.
The third lesson is distribution and the martech stack that a small team can actually run this week, because reaching people beats polishing features that nobody sees. Search still works if you write like a person and structure pages around jobs to be done; one landing page for each job with a bold promise, social proof, and a clear call to action, and keep page speed decent because slow pages kill trial intent long before your clever copy kicks in, especially now that searches change as people type. Pair content with simple funnels; Google Analytics for the basics, Clicky if you like live views, and AB testing with Website Optimizer or a homegrown toggle that splits new visitors, and track one metric that matters per page so you can say what changed and why, not drown in charts. For email, MailChimp and AWeber are good friends, and a short lifecycle sequence based on events beats a newsletter that tries to impress; send a setup checklist after signup, a nudge when a feature sits unused, and a plain text note from a founder when someone goes quiet for a week. Integrations open doors in 2010, so wire up Basecamp, Highrise, Google Apps Marketplace, and the Chrome Web Store when it lands for your type of tool, and treat each directory listing like a miniature landing page with its own headline and proof, because channels compound when you respect their audience. On the build side, host where you can sleep at night; a small VPS or EC2 for control, or Heroku for the push to deploy comfort, and back up to S3 on a daily schedule with alerts that actually wake you, and watch uptime with Pingdom so you learn about issues before your customers tweet about them. Finally, make a habit of small weekly releases, attach them to a public changelog, and email the wins in a tight note, because a steady drumbeat of visible progress turns customers into patient partners when something breaks or when you need to ask for feedback on pricing.Ship, charge, listen, and repeat; the boring loop outperforms the big reveal every single time.