Comments on: The key to making money: Charge for your product

It's tough making money online and with open-source software, but doubly if you don't charge for your product, and if you charge the wrong people.

[rcardona2k]

This is really spot-on! Especially "Charge for your product, but be careful whom you charge.". I've been both an enteprise developer and a shareware author, and I've been berated so badly for a $5 piece of software compared to the 100's of K the companies I've worked for charged enterprises. You can make great friends in many camps by doing the right thing and charging appropriately or giving the right thing away. It's a matter of knowing when and to whom. Offering free software for too long sometimes encourages some bad behavior and attracts freeloaders. OTOH, new concepts should almost always be free.

[jamesurquhart]

Another recent post that is related this subject is from Christopher Keene, titled "Startup reality check: launching versus landing". The key quote: "Here's the difference: it only takes a demo to launch a product, it takes a business model to land a customer."

As someone who has worked for both startups that have launched, and those that have landed, I can't think of a better way to explain it.

[The_Decider]

"Because proprietary vendors have long conditioned customers to expect to get charged for the wrong things or, at least, to expect to get charged too much for the right things."

That is exactly right!

Last winter I was advising a group that wanted to relight a HP network. When they tried the first time they gave all the control to Cisco, who gave them "a great deal" except to upgrade to what they claimed the routers and switches initially supported, they would need to buy an entire new line. Not surprising from a crappy company like Cisco, but the kicker is to this day that group still doesn't think they got ripped off.

Proprietary vendors have indeed conditioned businessman to take it with a smile and want to come back for more.