Software as a Business Part 4. Lessons from the trenches. A practitioner’s take that you can reuse tomorrow morning.
A quick talk before coffee
Founder: I have a small app that solves a real itch. Two people use it. One is my mom.
Friend: You shipping or still polishing the preferences window for the third time
Founder: Shipping is scary. How do I price it How do I get anyone to notice it
Friend: Treat it like a business. Not a hobby. Start with a tiny promise. Keep it. Charge a fair price. Talk about it every day. Repeat.
Founder: And the tech
Friend: Plenty of choices. Rails is hot. Ajax is everywhere. Hosting is cheaper than coffee. Amazon just gave us S3 for storage. Google Analytics is free. You do not need a team of ten to move.
What the trenches say
I have shipped small apps on the desktop and the web. Some flopped. A few paid rent. Here are patterns that keep showing up.
- Simple promise sells. One line that names the pain and the fix beats a feature list. Basecamp did this. So did Backpack. People buy relief. Not checkboxes.
- Trials convert when friction is low. A 14 day trial with no credit card tends to beat a long trial with hoops. I have seen one to three percent of trial users buy on small desktop tools. Web apps with a clear team use can get five to ten percent.
- Price signals quality. Too cheap is a red flag. For solo tools I have had better results at 29 to 49 dollars than at ten dollars. For team apps, monthly plans that start near 19 with a top tier above 99 give room to grow.
- Support is marketing. Fast and kind replies turn angry emails into referrals. A public FAQ and short screencasts save your inbox. Replies within a day keep churn down.
- Own your channel. Search traffic is nice. Still, an email list and an RSS feed you control are gold. FeedBurner makes tracking easy. A small list that opens your mail beats a giant crowd that forgets you exist.
- One focused page outperforms a clever site. A single landing page that says what and why with a short form wins. Cut copy until nothing breaks. Add a trustworthy buy button. Done.
- Pay per click can work in pockets. Start with exact match. Start tiny. Kill losers fast. Watch the cost of a sign up, not just clicks. If you can profit at small spend, only then nudge it up.
- Distribution still matters. For desktop, CNET Download and Tucows still send real traffic. For web apps, write on your own blog, guest post, and hang in the forums your buyers read. Digg and del.icio.us can spike traffic. Spikes do not equal sales. Relevance does.
- Payments are easy now. PayPal with IPN, or services like eSellerate and Share it, can take you live fast. Less code. More selling.
- Metrics beat hunches. Google Analytics gives funnels. Watch sign up rate, first week use, and paid conversion. If first session is not great, nothing else matters.
Putting it to work
Here is a straight path you can follow next week. No fluff.
- Pick the smallest painful slice. Write a one sentence promise. Example. Turn messy CSVs into clean contacts for Outlook. If you cannot explain it in one breath, keep trimming.
- Ship a narrow build. One main flow that works. Keep options out. Ship to five friends and two strangers. Fix what blocks them.
- Set one price and one trial. Do not run a menu yet. Pick a fair number. Offer 14 days. Email on day 1, 3, 7, and 12 with short tips. Each message should teach one small win.
- Create a landing page. Headline with the promise. Three bullets that map pain to fix. One short video or a gif. Social proof if you have it. Prominent Start trial and Buy buttons.
- Stand up payments. If desktop, generate license keys and send by email within minutes. If web app, first charge after trial. Keep cancel easy and clear. Trust builds sales.
- Choose one traffic source. Either write two useful posts a week for your niche, or buy a tiny set of exact match AdWords. Do not chase ten channels at once.
- Answer every support email. Same day if possible. Keep canned replies as snippets, but personalize the greeting and the close. People can smell a template.
- Review numbers every Friday. Trials started, trials activated, conversions, refunds, churn for web apps. Pick one number to improve next week. Ship one change.
- Document the learning. Keep a simple changelog and a why log. When confused, the why log saves you from repeating old mistakes.
Risks you will meet
- Platform shifts. A browser update or an OS patch can break your work. Keep a test machine on the latest beta. Ship small fixes fast.
- Payment hiccups. Gateways freeze funds when fraud spikes. Keep a second processor ready. Keep cash for at least two months of bills.
- Copycats. They will appear once you show demand. Keep pace by caring more about your users. Speed plus service beats clones.
- Ad channel swings. Bids jump when a big player enters. Never let ads be your only tap. Build that email list early.
- Feature creep. Every request is not a roadmap item. Collect them. Group them. Solve the root job, not each edge case.
- Support drain. Success brings questions. Add clear empty state guides. Add tooltips. Add a Getting Started path. Fewer tickets mean happier users and more time to build.
- Data loss fear. For web apps, back up daily. Test restores weekly. Tell users what you do. Trust grows when you are open about safety.
A quiet walk off
The web keeps buzzing. Ajax feels like magic. Rails makes the weekend hack feel like a product. MySpace is at full blast. Google just snapped up Writely and is moving fast on web apps. It is noisy out there, yet the same calm rules still win.
Build something small that actually helps. Say the promise in plain words. Ship early. Charge real money. Talk to customers. Fix what hurts. Keep your own channel. Watch the right numbers. Repeat.
If you keep at it week after week, you start to feel a rhythm. Not a hack to get rich. A simple beat. Make a promise. Keep it. That is software as a business.