I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

These are two paragraphs that any aspiring entrepreneur should read over and over again – this is the essence of why so many wannabe companies never get off the ground.  And why so many wannabe entrepreneurs are forever waiting for the stars to align for them to go whole hog after their vision.

Here’s an unfortunate fact of life: The stars will never align.  So if you’re waiting around for a few things to “fall into place”, you’re wasting time.  Just get started and get after it.

As Adam mentions, most problems you’re planning for right now will never come to fruition.  At least 95% of your planning time and energy is likely being wasted.

On the flip side, there are obstacles that you’ll never anticipate until you start off on your journey.  That’s OK – you’ll deal with them as they come.

The important thing is to “fail fast” – if something is not working, stop doing it, and start doing more things that are working.

But – what if nothing is working at all?  That’s OK too – actually it’s completely normal, especially for a startup.  See, you don’t have to be that far off for it to feel like nothing is lining up.

If I may, let me use Chrometa as an example.  One year ago at this time, we had very little working.  Our messaging and value proposition was not connecting with the market – people would go to our website, and wonder what the heck we (and our product) did.  Not good.

Our product itself was a little better.  It had evolved to the stage where trial and beta users would say “I can see where this is going.”

So we kept tweaking everything – our focus, the product itself, our messaging, etc.  It can be a maddening process, quite honestly, because you can make a lot of incremental improvements, and have nothing to show for it.

“How’s the startup going?” is a question people love to ask.  And it’s a question a pre-revenue company usually hates to answer!  Because it’s tough to say things are going well when you don’t yet have a product that people will gladly pay for.

But eventually, it came together for us.  We defined who we were.  We kept honing the product (and continue to do so).  And eventually things started to click.

Moral of the story – inaction is the enemy of the entrepreneur.  Get moving today.  You’ll figure out what works, what doesn’t (that’ll be a real long list initially), and most importantly, you’ll be able to go from there and start building something of real value.

And more importantly – can software companies provide a good to great level of support, and stay profitable?  Or will their ship inevitably be flooded and sunk by a never-ending barrage of phone calls from users?

First, let’s split the software universe up into two categories – SaaS (Software as a Service), and traditional.  SaaS companies make their money by charging a monthly or yearly subscription for their product.  The advantage to a user is that you can “rent” the use of the product, which means that you can get started for a lower entry price.  The disadvantage being the flip side of the same coin – you’re paying month after month, it’s not a “rent to own” type of deal.

It’s a sweet deal for the software vendor, if they can pull off this model, thanks to the continuity.  And because of this, support from SaaS vendors is usually quite good, because they do have to work to keep your business, and they’ll factor support costs into the subscription price.

Traditional software is a different animal.  Generally the up front cost is a one-time fee.  After that, the user is generally regarded more as a liability to the company – we’ve got your money, now you’re on your own!

From the vendor’s perspective, support can easily spiral out of control if left unchecked.  While the software business does carry high margins, these can quickly erode if you’re spending a lot of time supporting users, especially if you’re not receiving any more revenue in the process.

But from the customer’s perspective, they paid for the product, so don’t they have a right to get help in making it work?

We wrestled with this question in the process of bringing our product to market.  We really wanted Chrometa to work great for everyone…in fact, we were convinced (and still are) that it had to.  Because we don’t have a big sales/marketing machine, so we need our users to be our feet on the street, our evangelists.

We don’t have a subscription based product.  It’s a one-time, $99 price.  So we received a lot of warnings from people that we’d “go broke on support” – especially if we didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it.

It never felt right to me to charge support for a product that’s supposed to work “out of the box”.  Nor to anyone on our team.  And really, when we launched, our potential problem of “going broke on support” hinged on us actually having product traction – so that’d be a good thing!  Let’s get the product out there, and worry about the support economics later.

So we advertised free email support with the purchase of a license.  In practice, though, not only did we gladly accept support phone calls, but we’d often call people back after receiving a support email, because it’s usually easier to speak live with someone.  That’s always a fun thing to do, because people just about fall out of their chairs when we call!  The bar on software support is SO low, that it’s not all that hard to step over

A few months after launch, we formalized the phone support, got an 1-800 number, and tossed it up prominently on our website.  A funny thing happened then – the number of phone calls we received actually dropped.

Why would this be?  I think it’s a combination of factors, which has included a consistent “beefing up” of our online help resources, and the general improvement of our product.  But having the phone # there seems to put people at ease – it’s there if they need it.

Overall we’ve observed that people are very good about searching for help on their own, before they contact us.  Inbound inquiries usually fall into one of the following categories:

1. Bug reports – this has tailed off for us significantly in the 6+ months since we launched, as we’ve been able to address many bugs, as well as enhancements, in product updates.  Bug reports are very valuable to us, we definitely want to know about these.  So the easier we can make the process, the better.
2. Questions about how to do something – We actually launched without a product help guide, videos, anything!  Not that this was a badge of honor for us – it’s just that when you’re bootstrapping a software product yourself, you need to just to the basics, and get it to market.  And ultimately these help resources were not absolute “must haves” before launch – though we sure scrambled to put them together after!  Again, inquiries of this nature are always accepted, and helpful to us, as we can see where people are getting stuck, what may be unclear, etc.
3. Feature and enhancement suggestions - The best part of getting a product to market is the user feedback.  All of the product enhancements we’ve implemented over the last six months have been based on feedback from our users.  If you’re a software vendor, I’d think you’d always want to hear these.  Of course it’s not possible to implement everything.  But knowing is at least half the battle!

We recently started giving free licenses to students – which in theory, would further complicate our support.  How can you support free users without any funding!  Thus far, not a problem at all.  Every student we hook up with a free license is about as nice as could be.  Sure it takes me a few seconds to ping them back with a license code, but then again, I’m not a programmer, so it’s not like I’d be doing something more productive with my time anyway

Overall our early results on the “Great Free Support Experiment” have been very promising.  Our support time continues to trend gently down as our user base grows.  And to be honest, we try to look at support as a marketing function as well.  I always found it ironic that vendors who won’t accept inbound calls from users often have a telemarketing arm pounding the phones for new business in the next room!

Personally I spent so much time groveling for phone calls and meetings in our very early days with prospective users – “please, just try my product!” – that I’m hardwired now to gladly speak with anyone who wants to speak with me!

If you’re a fellow startup or early stage software company, my advice would be to absolutely give the best support that you can.  Take care of your users now – you can always worry about “scaling” and taking over the world later.