Too often technology companies focus too heavily on their technologies and not their business. As a technologist, I enjoy the technical nature of my work far more than the administrative aspects of my role. However, the administrative aspects allow the business to focus on the technologies and the technologies to focus on our business and customers.

You can't get away with only focusing on one-half of that equation. If you think of Web companies like Webvan, Flooz.com, Pets.com and Boo.com that focused on their technologies but didn't properly understand their customers or their business holistically, you get a sense of how important it is to focus on your business from end to end.

What is challenging in today's business environment is that a lot of services that could have been offered for a price are given away and then the companies offering that service have to come up with a business reason to exist. The famous Twitter "where is the business model" comes to mind but every online radio station or newspaper that doesn't try to make money through both their normal advertising and customer purchasing model does as well.

When you get a newspaper on the street you will likely pay for it and it will have advertising. This dual payment model had worked for a long time (or at least newspapers were not dying as fast) until the Internet had newspapers only offering the advertising half of their model. Once customers get use to not paying for something, it is hard to move them from zero cost to some cost since they won't associate it with something requiring a purchase.

The key, if you are building a technology for sale (or one day hope will be sold), is to think now about the business model that will support that technology or set of technologies and processes. Don't be afraid to go through a "beta" period where you let customers know they will be part of the pricing phase to determine what your offering is worth. You will probably be worried your customers will want to pay an insignificant amount for your offering but usually individuals or companies are willing to pay for what they believe adds value, if nothing else to sustain the support for that offering.