An entrepreneur mental state

I was an employee in large corporations for my entire career so far. It's very easy to dream about quiting and starting something by yourself. There's a great distance between thinking and actually doing. An important step is communicating. First, with myself (yes, say it out loud). Then to others. The mind can play tricks here. It wants to stay on the safe shores of your comfy corporate positions. So, once I communicate I put the mind in a tough spot of saying things it doesn't really mean.

When I walked to my boss's office to hand out my resignation I was past the thinking games. It was time for the mind to take down the gloves and get physical. My throat was dry and my voice was very weak... but I did it.

So now, I'm here and the game continues. Keeping my self confidence over the time can be tricky.  Especially when I'm currently the sole founder of my startup (hoping this will soon change).

Which brings me to my next question. I was planning to give the basic version of my product for free in order to gain market share. I was very confident that this is the right way to go until I got the third feedback against it and started thinking that maybe it's not such a good idea to give my software for free. I mean people must be crazy to pay for it... I'll summarize the topic of giving away a basic edition in one of the upcoming posts.

As for the self confidence... it's all about reminding yourself that it can work. Post a big sign over your head if it helps...

Cheers,

Zviki

Comments

[Itai Frenkel]

Hi Zviki,

About the "free" version questions. Here are a few thoughts:
1) Think of giving the free version a business model too. Make sure it brings value for the target audience (for example a Student Version). That will help you define what should be free and what's not free.

2) You can give the full version for free if it makes sense. For example the basic version costs X and has cost options A.B,C. You could give options A,B for free for a certain period of time. It is better then selling (X+A+B) and giving a discount, since discounts is something customers are getting all too used to (would customers get the discount in the next upgrade -NO), while getting things free is obviously a one time gesture (would they pay extra upgrade to get the latest A+B versions - YES).

3) Another possible baseline could be defined by looking at the current freeware / lowcost / sourceforge / opensource offering. If this is given for free, then it provides some kind of comparison or baseline for you "free" version.

Behazlaha,
Itai
http://www.linkedin.com/in/itaifrenkel

[Zviki]

Thanks, Itai.
I will summarize it in one of the upcoming blog posts. It's a big topic with many variables. From my perspective, I'm now leaning towards having a paid version only. It also depends on the funding - I will NEED to start making money as soon as possible in order to survive.