While I was still in university writing my final thesis paper, I came to the conclusion that, once I graduate from university and got a regular 40 hour per week job, there wouldn't be much time left to work on my project.
The basic question for me was: How do I keep maintaining and improving the website with only the bit of revenue I got from ads and donations? That was maybe 300-500 bucks a month.
The answer was: I couldn't. Not with what I had in mind for my project. It wasn't enough to pay a programmer, an app developer and someone who writes educational articles for the project.
I was just the average IT student back then. Not much sense for business. I mean, I thought about how I could make money from it once in a while. I still have a list on my computer ideas to earn 10,000 euros with my project that I once wrote. Freemium for example, a standalone desktop application, and other ideas.
After a long thought process and endless discussions with an older friend, I came to the conclusion that literally change my life: I had to start charging people for my product. All of them. No freemium nonsense and all that other crap that was in my list.
Being the altruistic student, I anticipated that people would be disappointed. I could almost feel their soon-to-come disappointment and asking them for money was something that didn't fit my world view for a long time. It was hard to accept that I'd lose people. Sounds stupid in hindsight, but that's how I felt.
With this conclusion, a new feeling emerged that got deeply engrained, which I consider a fundamental thing for doing business:
If people don't value what you have to offer, they're not worth your time.
So, even if people were disappointed, it wouldn't be my fault. After all, I offer a truly great service and it should be worth a couple bucks a month.
Despite my newly won enthusiasm, I went ahead and wasted another nine months, before I finalized my decision. I had very sophisticated tactics for sabotaging myself. I got this braindead idea to rewrite everything from scratch in a newer technology to have it maintainable for years to come. I thought I'd have to offer more content, more articles, more whatever. It was madness. And nonsense.
Another friend brought me down and he said: Look, you have a great product as it is. Just charge for it. You don't need anything else.
So, a few days after my graduation and about 4 weeks until my first real job began, I send an email to all my users, telling them that my product would cost a euro a month, starting in 30 days.
I hit Send and thought that I'd either wreck this thing totally, lose many many people, lose my project I spent five years on to improve, or that it'd be a good thing after all and I could continue running and improving my project.
Merely 7 days before several thousand accounts expired, I finished the last line of code on my payment processing.
Two weeks later, I had 20,000 Euros in my bank account.
