Software is a business before it is art. If you forget that part, the market will remind you at billing time.
Ship something that earns, or you are just funding a hobby with nicer tools.
People keep asking what the real lessons are when you try to turn software into a paycheck. The first one is simple and a little boring. Pick a problem that already commands a budget. Chasing attention is fun. Chasing budgets pays rent. Right now the App Store looks like a gold rush, but most folks are learning that ninety nine cent dreams do not cover support, updates, and your coffee habit. A small product that saves a sales team ten hours a month will beat a pretty toy with a thousand downloads. B2B is not glamorous, but a manager with a credit card and a clear pain is your best early investor. If you must go consumer, find a channel. SEO helps if you can write, and search ads are a tax you pay until your content works. Blogs, screencasts, and a simple newsletter still punch above their weight. Each post should teach and should ask for the email. Your list is your runway. Do not wait for press. Press spikes are sugar highs. Subscribers and steady signups are the real meal. Prices also speak louder than features. Try real pricing. Do not apologize for charging. Try a short trial that asks for a card up front, and if your gut says that is too bold, ask for the card at day seven. The only rule is to talk to buyers every week. Hear why they paid, hear why they did not, and feed that back into copy and product. You will ship less fluff and more fixes. If you sell desktop software, say what you do in the first sentence on the page. If you sell a service, say the job you do and the risk you remove. People buy the fix, not the tech. Write your home page like a sales email to one person with one headache. Cut adjectives. Show proof. Offer a real guarantee. Mention the calendar. Make it easy to start now. That is the funnel in plain clothes.
Second lesson. Onboarding is the product. Everyone loves to talk about frameworks, but the first session is the moment of truth. If setup is weird, they bounce. If the first data looks empty, they bounce. Seed the demo with friendly sample data so the first screen explains itself. Guide the hand, but do not box people in. Put one clear next step on every screen. If you sell a service, a simple call to check the first week can cut churn more than any tooltip. If you sell a download, an email with a short setup video on day one beats a manual that no one reads. Track activation like you track uptime. You do not need fancy tools. Google Analytics and a spreadsheet can show the first steps that predict success. Try tiny A B tests with Website Optimizer on the signup page and the first run page. Change one thing. Ship. Learn. Repeat. Keep your release cycle short. Weekly is great. Daily if you can keep the quality. Users forgive bugs if you fix fast and talk straight. They do not forgive silence. Put your changelog on the site and in the app. That is public proof that you care. Support is not overhead. Support is marketing with a direct line to your roadmap. Every ticket is a tiny spec. Answer fast, write like a human, and pull answers into a growing help center that is not hidden behind a login. GetSatisfaction or UserVoice can help you hear patterns. If your crowd lives on Twitter, listen there, but do not chase every mention. Steady replies beat clever jokes. Offer one to one calls for stuck teams. A thirty minute chat can save a deal and teach you the next right feature. Record the words people use and put those words on the site. Your copy will start to sell on its own. That is the simplest kind of product market fit. Clients say your words back to you with their card out. That is a good day.
Third lesson from the trenches. Pick boring tech that you can run in your sleep. The cloud is getting friendlier. EC2 and S3 are solid enough for real work, and CloudFront handles files without costing a kidney. Slicehost is now under the Rackspace wing and still a safe bet. Heroku is lovely if you live in Ruby land. App Engine is a neat path if you can live inside its box. A plain server can still be the right call if you know how to keep it tidy. Keep state in one database. Keep logs. Back up every day to something you do not control. Test your restore once a month, not in your head, for real. Git is getting popular for a reason. Even if your team is small, branching without pain changes how you ship. Subversion still works fine if you keep it simple. Do not build for a million users before you find a hundred who pay. Caches and shards can wait. Speed matters, but most apps are slow because of dumb queries and heavy pages. Trim the page weight, serve static stuff from S3 or a CDN, and cut the first render to something lean. Keep secrets out of the code. Keep config in env or a file you do not commit. For desktop apps, accept that piracy exists. Spend more time on happy paying users than on locks that make legit buyers mad. Simple keys and a soft call home are enough for most cases. If you sell to companies, an offline path for activations will save your support from proxy pain. For payments, PayPal covers the basics, Authorize Net handles cards if you can stomach their docs, and Google Checkout is handy for one offs. Recurring billing is clunky, so budget time for the edge cases. Expired cards, bank declines, and double charges will chew mornings if you have no tools. Write your own dunning emails early. Be kind, clear, and give a one click path to update the card. If you sell across borders, at least be aware that taxes and invoices are not the same everywhere. Ask for a tax id when needed. Keep clean receipts. Charge in the currency people expect even if your bank grumbles. On the marketing side, keep an eye on the places where your buyers hang out. A small forum post that solves a real pain will beat a glossy ad. Content is a machine that starts slow and then compounds. Case studies with real numbers still move deals. Ask for permission to use names and logos, and make it easy to say yes by doing the heavy lifting on the draft. Partnerships are great when they are about sharing customers not just swapping logos. A tight integration that saves time for both sets of users will do more than any sponsored post. Keep an eye on outages. Your status page should live outside your main stack. Say what broke and what you are doing about it. Honesty buys patience. Silence burns trust that marketing cannot buy back.
Keep it simple and keep the loop tight. Ship, charge, listen, fix, and then do it again with a little more courage.