Show Me the Money
You should get paid for what you do. There, I said it. Seriously, if you are a professional, it makes no sense to give-away your services. I'm not talking about pro-bono work for charities, causes you believe in, or that website for your favorite uncle. I'm talking about work for your clients (if you're a contractor) or your end-users (if you sell a product), including your not-so-favorite-uncle, Your goal should be to make money. At the end of the day, the thing that allows you to stay in business, doing what you do, and being energized by it is going to be your ability to make a living and getting paid. If you have clients who always want something for free, are they really worth it? It's easy to feel guilty when asking for money. "I wouldn't pay that much for this.", you may say, but that's only because you know how to do it. I don't know how to fix a furnace, and in the middle of winter, when my furnace explodes, I'm more than happy to pay. "But they are looking to do this BIG project next year." Well, guess what? That's next year and right now they are asking you do do everything for free. The BIG project next year is just a carrot. And carrots aren't that good, especially if they don't grow. Chances are that if you give your work away for free now, you'll rush it, do a poor job, not appreciate it, and neither will your users. That BIG project you wanted to win… Do you even want it now? This isn't about being a greedy capitalist, this is just about doing what you love, and finding a way to do it that makes your users, and you, happy. Your end users may not even realize this, but it's in their best interests if you stay around. That's how they get updates, and enhancements down the road, and you'll be able to offer that cheaper than anyone else will.
From Single-Serving to SaaS
I'm constantly amazed at how difficult it is to move from a working self-sufficient single-use software product to a SaaS (software as a service) model. You'd think that once you have the actual "product" fleshed out and usable that it would be trivial to simply make that an automatic thing. I'm sure in some cases it may be, but I'm finding that the process to move from a single-serving, stand-along product to a marketable SaaS offering requires a lot of work.
Our company built a product for internal use a few years ago. It was rough but worked for us (we use this product on projects for our direct clients). About two years ago, learning what we had, we completely revamped and re-wrote a large portion of the code base, knowing that eventually we MAY want to make this a SaaS product. Currently we still directly install the product for our clients, However, recently we've begun adding features and making updates to little-by-little allow us to get this product into a SaaS model. You'd tend to think that this is easy, "Hey, just put a registration form online, accept payment, and boom! Magic." Well, I can say that it just isn't that easy. At least not with this product (it's a CMS with our own special take on content editing). The questions you have to answer and the steps you have to take to get the machine to replicate everything we do with developers is easily 40% of the project. You need a website to promote the SaaS, registration, credit card payment with recurring billing. The, you need to be able to do on-the-fly server configurations with redundancy and fallbacks. Finally, you have to have a way to edit all the "meta" information that goes into a CMS, how should it be set-up, how do they add templates, or themes, or get their art up to their site. This is all currently handled by our development team, but making this doable by a client is an entirely different story. It's one of those lessons for the books, that building the widgets isn't necessarily the work, the work is actually getting it out there, making it available, and making it easy to begin using. It's not the thing you "tack-on" it's the thing itself. Your ability to easily allow others to start paying you and using your products IS your product.
Giving it a Go
Somebody made the comment that to become a good writer, you should just write. Everyday. Something. Now, while I think little of my writing ability, and even less of my analysis, I think it would be good to get them "out there" for the world to criticize. Such an act, I believe, will help to solidify my views and thoughts. Exposure to criticism is one thing that allows us to grow and be more discerning. So, beginning today (and hopefully onward) I plan to try and write a few sentences/paragraphs a day. My hope is that eventually I will begin to land on topics that really resonate with me and that in finding those topics, I find my voice. Thanks for joining the ride.