All of this discussion about trust really started with me thinking about the role of trust in building a business. Building Infinity Softworks has been all about building a relationship with my customer. At the center of that relationship is trust. Trust, then, is the only true currency we each have. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? And when the trust is gone, so is the relationship.

That’s where SOPA and PIPA failed. The entertainment industry lost our trust. The government lost our trust. This is the fundamental problem facing Google, where it has bastardized search results to ensure that Google+ is at the top. This is why no one really trusts Facebook. The company builds itself on privacy but every time money is at stake Facebook is more than willing to throw privacy out the door.

In the early days of building a company we have a choice: we can ask for money today or ask for money tomorrow. If you ask for money today then we are each attempting to make money before we have built a trusting relationship with the customer. If we wait and make money tomorrow then we have built a relationship with the customer before asking her to pay. Once we have trust, the relationship between the company and customer is much stronger and worth a lot more money.

Unless I am referred [1], I have no knowledge of who you are and no interaction to trust you.

In the old days there was little choice. We walked into retail stores and asked a clerk or shelled out $50-200 because we had no options. But now the App Store has 500,000 titles and the Internet has 450 million web sites. We have option overload. Now we need different methods of building trust: free versions, freemium business models, trials. Without those we drop the price to $.99 and hope it is too low for anyone to care, even though they do. Funding, too, has become a currency of trust. If I have it then someone must have decided this was a good product and worth trying.

This mentality isn’t just invading the tech world, though, it is invading everywhere. Companies that don’t make the transition, from automatic trust to earning trust, are all going to die.

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[1] In this case the trust is inferred and built off of the relationship between the referee and referrer. This is why my dad trusts my opinion about technology but doesn’t trust my opinion about coffee, since I don’t drink it.