Great piece. I agree that revenue brings momentum, without it it's hard to know where you're going or if you're doing things right.
I'd say especially as a technical single founder (me), it's all too easy to focus on building features and having the mindset of "If I build 1 more feature, then they will come (and buy)."
The real hard thing (for us) is to convince other people to buy. And that's probably something you should spend most of your time on: Figure out who your customers are. Figure out why they would buy. I know we have a tendency to spend time with what we're comfortable with (for me that would be coding and SEO).
It takes real determination to do things that are hard to do and for which we have no clue. For me it would be cold calling and convincing businesses to buy my solution, since people arriving on my website seem to have other intentions in mind, for a reason I have yet to discover.
I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS + outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues.
Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress.
So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days.
[1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.
Being a (relatively) non-technical founder, I'm on the opposite of that spectrum though... I can conceptualize new ideas & business models, but don't have the skills to get it to MVP where I can convince a technical co-founder of the merits of the project and get them to join the team.
I'd suggest one thing if anyone reads this and gets down heartened about their lack of ability to generate early revenue. Whilst looking for revenue as soon as possible certainly makes sense I think you can get momentum to sustain you through the highs/lows in other ways. Certainly looking at usage metrics can help convince you you're moving in the right direction. But most important to me has been trying to move things forward every day. There are days where that's not possible, but the default evening activity is to do even just 30 mins or and hour on my project. Even if things seem a struggle, there's usually something interesting to work on which will make at least a small improvement.
To counter the obvious criticism here, I am aware that this could lead to maintaining optimism working on something which will never generate revenues. You still need to have a plan to generate cash and to test your assumptions about how that will work.
Just a little bug report: Your fancy "position:fixed-when-scrolled-down" social tool thingy is broken and overlays the comments below your post, because they don't have the same margin-right value that your post has.
(Did I mention that I really dislike these position:fixed things? They are what the flash intro was back in the days)
I could be wrong, but I've come to believe that grit (http://bradt.ca/grit-scale.html) is everything. Because if you don't have revenues or momentum to start, it is grit that will get you there. Those without high grit will quit prematurely.
Just coming back to this thread because I grabbed my Grit Scale score (4/5) and watched the TED talk, which turned out to be one of the first to hold my interest in a long while - I've seen most of the 'TED classics'.
I seem to be in the upper quartile that is statistically likely to have what it takes to stick it out, but it feels far from certain. Perhaps it provided a slight boost in self-confidence.
In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It ties in nicely with the 'Drunkard's Walk' (cf. Mlodinov) randomness/perseverance traits that seem to increase the probability of achieving one's goals.
[+] [-] toumhi|14 years ago|reply
I'd say especially as a technical single founder (me), it's all too easy to focus on building features and having the mindset of "If I build 1 more feature, then they will come (and buy)."
The real hard thing (for us) is to convince other people to buy. And that's probably something you should spend most of your time on: Figure out who your customers are. Figure out why they would buy. I know we have a tendency to spend time with what we're comfortable with (for me that would be coding and SEO).
It takes real determination to do things that are hard to do and for which we have no clue. For me it would be cold calling and convincing businesses to buy my solution, since people arriving on my website seem to have other intentions in mind, for a reason I have yet to discover.
[+] [-] thhaar|14 years ago|reply
Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress.
So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days.
[1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.
[+] [-] adii|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robinwarren|14 years ago|reply
To counter the obvious criticism here, I am aware that this could lead to maintaining optimism working on something which will never generate revenues. You still need to have a plan to generate cash and to test your assumptions about how that will work.
[+] [-] adii|14 years ago|reply
Revenue is just the "nice" one, because it pays the bills as well... :P
[+] [-] yaix|14 years ago|reply
(Did I mention that I really dislike these position:fixed things? They are what the flash intro was back in the days)
[+] [-] adii|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thhaar|14 years ago|reply
I seem to be in the upper quartile that is statistically likely to have what it takes to stick it out, but it feels far from certain. Perhaps it provided a slight boost in self-confidence.
In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It ties in nicely with the 'Drunkard's Walk' (cf. Mlodinov) randomness/perseverance traits that seem to increase the probability of achieving one's goals.
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
Fascinating.