It happens again and again.  The aspiring entrepreneur comes up with a truly great idea.  He or she first shares it with friends and family, and they all love it.  Then, somewhat emboldened, our entrepreneur shares the idea with a few prospective customers.  And then a few more. 

And the feedback is great.  Everyone likes the idea.  And since it's a web idea that will be free to use, the entrepreneur is confident that as soon as the site is ready to go, lots of people will sign up.  After all, they really like it!  And surely a two or three or four percent of them will see the value of the "premium" version and pay for it.

The prospective customer feedback and ideas are noted, the code is written, the search-engine optimization is completed, and the site is rolled out.  There's even some traffic.  But pitifully few people actually become active users, much less paying customers.

Sadly, people can like your idea, but, at the same time, not find that it's compelling enough for them to actually go through the trouble of using it.  We're all bombarded daily with a huge number of opportunities to spend our time focusing on different interests, curiousities, and activities.  Your idea may sound good, but it has to compete with a lot of other ideas, and a lot of other distractions that people have in their lives.

And those are at least some of the reasons that it takes time - a lot more time than one would like to think - to ramp users and, then, revenue in online businesses.  (In most businesses, for that matter.)

So what is an enterpreneur to do?  I'd suggest at least two tactics:

1. Find an enterpeneur who has done something similar or related to what you're doing, buy them a coffee or beer, and find out what their usage and revenue ramp looked like.  And learn as much as you can from their experience.  It will give you a calibration point for what to expect - and maybe some lessones learned that will help your ramp to go faster.

2. Start selling something to customers as early in the process as you can.  You learn a huge amount when you put yourself in the position of asking for money.  Many tech start-up entrepreneurs are very uncomfortable with the idea of selling something.  They'd rather do what they are comfortable doing - continuing to work on the product.  But you don't really find out what's important to customers, and what their objections are, until you ask for an order. 

When it comes to product feedback, money is the sincerest form of flattery.

(Originally posted at http://www.otbc.org)