CEO

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…o worried someone will take their idea, so they don't ever talk about it to a wide variety of people. If you "eat like an elephant and poop like a bird" (Guy Kawasaik in Rules for Revolutionaries), and actually talk about your idea to people you meet, then you can get feedback, develop their idea, figure out if there is a market for it, and through serendipity find a person or two who is equally passionate about your idea and may be a good partner to collaborate with you. Talking with others helps with timing too. It's important to get an idea going so you can get your software built as the demand in the market is accelerating. But at the same time, by bouncing your idea off lots of people you will gain datapoints and then grow intuition about if the market is really ready for this yet. "Too early is sometimes as bad as too late" (Sandra …

I remember a great story from Sandra Kurtzig's book "CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up". She demoed her package to her first customer. He was wowed and asked , "How much?" She was worried about overpricing, but she said "$50,000" anyway. And when he didn't blink, she added, "per module." And when he still didn't object, "per year." It really depends on who your customer is. Many managers have discretion up to $1000, so a few hundred dollars is not a hard sell. Above that gets into the corporate approval cycle. If you are selling enterprise software, you can get away with $2500 per seat, but then your selling cycle becomes months long. If you are selling to consumers, maybe only a few dollars or a few $10's of dollars. Think TurboTax. Developers are the really cheap bastards, maybe $.05, But they can probably talk the…