Make a good product first, then worry about revenue

First and foremost, focus on making a good product that people like, then worry about how to make money. If something is driven by an innate passion inside of you, then is it really about money? I don't think it should be. If that venture goes belly-up, you may be out investment capital and out of the product you loved, but you should have at least acquired something from the journey and enjoyment of working with that passion along the way.

When I meet people and talk to them about Team Cowboy (my sports team management web site, www.teamcowboy.com), I often get asked the question, "so how do you make money?". I tell them simply that I'm focusing on adding great features and growing the user base. I do have plans to make money -- I have ideas on how to go about it -- but for now, that's not important to me. I'd rather focus on getting the features right, getting more users on the site, and making sure those users are happy (I'm fanatic about customer service; there's simply no excuse to not keep the reason your product exists happy). So far, I think I've succeeded in keeping my customers happy. It's definitely tricky sometimes when you run a free web site. Suppose you were running an e-commerce web site. If customers are unhappy or have a bad experience, you can discount their order, send them coupons, or use other incentives. Anything I give them comes directly out of my pocket (and not just out of my profit margin, as would be the case with an e-commerce site). I get a lot of feedback from my users during the course of customer service emails, and an ecstatic "Thank you!" is probably the most common thing I hear. That keeps me motivated and excited to roll out the great new features (and trust me, there are a lot of them).

I am not oblivious to the fact that as the site grows in popularity, traffic will increase, and that alone will start costing more in bandwidth and other related web hosting costs -- and those are just the hard costs that I MUST face to keep the site showing up when you go to the URL. I will have enough revenue coming in when it's necessary (and even a bit before), but it's not my #1 priority right now.

The article I was reading that made me think of this was about the upcoming release of Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0. At the end, David Ascher, Chief Executive of Mozilla Messaging said:

I'm deferring the revenue model issues for a while. The first priority will be to produce good software. The model used for Firefox was not to generate something that would generate revenue, it was to create the best browser possible. I'm following that recipe again.

Simple words and roughly what I'm going after with Team Cowboy.