Stan Scroeder makes an interesting point regarding the difference between launching a product and launching a business.
You must decide, early on, if you’re creating a product or launching a business.
Web 2.0 has encouraged an aggressive launch of products and services that are often confused as businesses. We launched an app last April that received a little outside attention. While we thought of it as a service, it was often reviewed as a business.
Feed Rinse offered a paid version (it has since been made freeforall) – maybe that made it confusing. But revenue models and business models are different.
Personally, I don’t believe in subsidizing one venture with another unless the potential to become a self-sustained model exists. But in this case, we made an exception. There’s an acute need for rss filtering, but it’s more of a feature of a service than a service itself. (That isn’t to say we couldn’t redeploy with a business model and move from product to business.)
Yesterday we launched [the marketing site of] our newest product, a personal health assessment. Wellstream is another example of a service/product we’ve launched that takes care of an acute need. But this time it’s a business.
The difference between the two is in the business plan. In the race to participate in w2o, developers often forget that part. You can always sell off a product, but you can rarely run it.