What You Practice

I saw a very interesting blog at 37 Signals on this quote

“The things you do more often are the things you’re going to get good at. So if you get really good at spending money, you’re going to be really good at spending money. If you have to work on making money from day one, you’re going to get really damn good at making money. And that’s what you need to be as an entrepreneur…

The problem I have is when companies’ business model is free only. And then they say, “We’ll figure out how to make money later.” As if there’s going to be this magic switch they can flip…If you’re not practicing making money, you’re not going to be able to flip that switch and just know how to do it really well. You need to have some time. You need to have some experience at making money.”

It’s by Jason Fried from an interview on the new workplace for the new normal.

In all of my businesses, we’ve had an idea on how to make money from day one. We haven’t always been successful at it, but we knew in a few of them that we were going to depend on advertising. In another we knew that paying students were important.

I think that often someone is looking at another business and think they they will duplicate the revenue model at some point, even if they don’t state it or even consciously realize it. For many companies on the Internet, advertising seems to be the default model, or maybe fallback model, if nothing else works.

There are a few companies that have grown very large without an overt revenue model (Google, Twitter), but that’s the exception. Counting on being an outlier is a good way to fail.