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Comment by vermorel | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: CEO of a midsize enterprise software company.

Frankly, I just disagree:

* Pricing is mostly irrelevant at the beginning. Even Google didn't figure out its business model and pricing long after they were created. The only thing that matter initially is to gradually converge toward something the market want (it's a journey).

* Charging per user is only one of the many many options. It does not have to be that way. Many very successful software businesses don't charge that way.

* Enterprise software is (comparatively) the easiest to self-fund. Most companies in this area are bootstrapped. It takes a single client to achieve ramen profitability for a team of 2 or 3.

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Yeah, that makes sense. I don't think I have the enterprise experience to land an enterprise client, though, and the iteration length on closing a successful sale where I could learn which tactics work and which ones don't is super long. I imagine it would take many more years of experience than I have to pull that off.

Response to edit: I think you make some great points, but I'm not sure how applicable they are to a self-funded solo bootstrapper... how did you launch your company?

My goal is to reach $2k/mrr in the next two months so that I can go full-time on the startup and apply all of my time to making it better / marketing it better, in order to hit escape velocity where my books are completely in the black without having to work a day job.

I launched my company as a self-funded solo bootstrapper straight out of university. I took some love money, that I mostly didn't use, and bought half of those shares back at ~4x the original price a decade down the road.

2k USD per month is nothing to a large company. Forget about the per month part, just charge a flat 100k USD package with 2 or 3 payment milestones over a quarter or two. You can give away IP too. You don't really care, you're not going to build your end-game software product on top of a rushed prototype anyway.

However, you have to meet with prospects (executives). Lots of them. It's tough to even get one call, but once you get there, the one question to ask is: what's your biggest problem? and then improvise. After many meetings, you will see patterns emerge, both in types of problems and potential solutions.

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