Our first customer for our collaboration tool Loomio (htp://www.loomio.org) was the coworking space we were working in and the social enterprise hub that was based there.
We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to).
If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.
A lot of people have happily paid us money, which is awesome. But we've decided to transition to a true "gift economy" model now. In the next few weeks, we're launching a big crowdfunding campaign to fund development of Loomio 1.0, where we're taking the learnings from our first 10,000 users and creating a much more accessible, mobile responsive, intuitive tool. After crowdfunding, we're going to just be giving the basic software away for free and accepting donations instead of having a structured subscription model.
At the same time though, we've had massive pull from enterprise customers for consulting to go alongside the tool to help them do really good internal collaboration and culture change to a more distributed leadership model, as well as facilitate constituent and stakeholder collaboration. That's been a significant source of income for us.
Overall, the commitment to "pay what you can" has been core to our model and our values, and we're sticking with it, but we're experimenting with interpreting it in different ways. It's very important to us to both be independently financially sustainable, and to give our tool to groups doing great stuff in their communities regardless of their financial means.
We built a tool that was instantly useful to them, and in exchange we instantly had 100+ users. We released an extremely "M" MVP and had real users from day one. Because they were using it free and we were building features in response to their direct feedback, they were very understanding about it being a rough prototype. Two years later, they voluntarily opted to generously backpay us for use of the tool (we didn't even ask them to).
If you can get real users from very early on, even if your tool is rough, do it! It will help you build what's really useful to people, and involving early users in the design process actively means they are motivated to use the tool early and help you make it work as well as possible as quickly as possible.