If you haven’t done it yet (this recommended reading was published at the end of 2010) I strongly suggest you to thoroughly read why the authors of several software products decided to pull the plug.
You can also read my, unfortunately, own experience on this topic
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
I use twitter as a work tool every day and I’m always looking for new people to follow (among the ones that follow me or thanks to the twilert search alerts that I’ve setup).
Unfortunately, I end up following few of the interesting people I find because there is too much noise in their accounts (noise defined as “a lot of personal tweets”).
Let’s be honest, I’m really glad that you enjoyed your bagel with cream cheese this morning or that you became the mayor of X but I don’t really care. So, if I don’t follow you back don’t get mad at me, it’s not personal, I just don’t have time/interest in your personal life.
So, if you created a twitter account as part of your marketing strategy for your mISV please make sure that each tweet is worth reading. Keep personal stuff for your personal twitter account but don’t mix things up. I (and for sure others) would appreciate it. Thanks!
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
This is the second in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my previous business attempt, that I end up giving up for free due to the lack of clients (the blog part is still fully alive and I do get some revenue from ads, but that’s all).
In the previous post, I recommended to Choose a cool technology to sell.
My second advice is don’t try to sell to developers. Sure, I’m not the first one to say this, but I fell in this trap nonetheless.
Let’s start with the “why’s”:
If you knew it would be hard, why you chose to build a product for developers in the first place?. Well, first it’s in our human nature to think we can do better than others so we tend to believe their failure was due to other reasons and not the fact that the market was indeed difficult. The second reason, IMHO, why we tend to build products for developers is that, as developers ourselves, we know and like the domain so instead of investigating opportunities in other domains (as I did with my current business) we prefer to stay in our comfort zone.
And why selling to developers is so hard? My main reasons are:
- Developers are used to get things for free. You’ll most likely be competing with free and even open source alternatives of your product
- Developers have a better idea of how difficult is to create the product you’re trying to sell and may think they can build it themselves
- In a company, developers are not the ones with the money. So, your product must so great that they decide to talk management into buying it.
In my specific case, there was an aggravating factor. A common aspect mentioned by all vendors of MDE/code-generation tools I interviewed was that, at the beginning, to sell their tools they had to prove to each individual client the benefits of using the tool (usually this meant working together with the client in a first project almost for free to showcase all the tool possibilities). Being a micropreneur, this was impossible in my case. Again, if you choose a cool technology to sell you may not have last problem.
Any other reasons you want to share?
Usual Disclaimer: “Yes I know that you have a great product for developers and you’re becoming rich with it (congratulations!). You’re one of the few success stories but not the rule”
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
CSS Killswitch lets you non- destructively black out a difficult client’s website with the click of a button since as they say “Because sometimes, no matter how diplomatic you are, people are… well… mean.”
I say this is a funny strategy because of course its practical effect is limited (there’s no magic so it can be annoying for a while but the client can end up figuring out how to avoid the black out).
However since it seems that it’s a legal move it may be enough to convince your client that paying is in the end a better option.
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
Interesting poll in hacker news: as a freelancer how much do you bill per hour?
To be honest I don’t know how value their time those that say that charge less than 50 USD per hour. I guess all depends on where you live but to me this is extremely low. Specially, because usually people don’t count the time of negotiating and clarifying the requirements with the customer (and at the end discussing with him/her details of the produced work, getting the final approval,….), which may account for several additional hours. And of course, you are also usually wrong when estimating the number of hours required to complete the work!. So, IMHO the real price per hour ends up being at least a 40% lower of what you expected (and this is just the gross income, then you need to subtract taxes and all other costs). So, to sum up, increase your billing rates!!!
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
I’m pretty sure that hiring a lawyer is not one of your priorities when starting your new entrepreneur project. There are several reasons for this: lack of money (they don’t come cheap!), lack of time (to find one, to discuss with him/her about your needs,…) and probably the feeling that the kind of product/service you offer is not so critical to make this a priority (most likely, you’ve outsourced the management of payments to PayPal, FastSpring or similar so you don’t store customer personal data, credit cards,…).
Myself, I’ve now (after 6 months of starting migratetoWP.com) added a “lawyer-approved” full terms and conditions document in my site. Why now and not before?. There are several reasons. For instance, I’ve now a little bit more time and money available and after working with many clients since I started, I’ve now a better idea of what things can go wrong. At the beginning it would have much difficult to identify the points that need to be covered by the terms and conditions
But really, by far the most important reason to do it was peace of mind. After encountering a couple of toxic clients that even threaten to sue me (I knew it was a bluff but still…) I realized I had to be prepared in case something really bad happened one day. I realized that I could lose a lot of money not because some client tried to sue me or asked for a (unfair) refund but just because I could lose a lot of productive hours by discussing with angry clients that either on purpose or simply by ignorance (i.e. clients that have no idea of WordPress and thus they have unrealistic expectations of the result of a migration to wordpress) complain about the quality of the work.
Most likely (crossing my fingers here) I’ll never need to resort to these terms and conditions but I know I’m covered and that if a situation arises I can always tell the client s/he already accepted those conditions when purchasing the service.
A different discussion is how long/precise these terms and conditions need to be. I tried to keep them as simple as possible so that those clients that want to do it can even understand them. So, probably, there are still some uncovered scenarios but I’m confident we’ve covered the most relevant ones.
I’d love to you know your position on this topic. Have you done something similar (why/why not)? Have you noticed if this has made you lose some clients (I’ve the feeling that some clients could be scared by this, even in fact, we accept terms and conditions that we don’t even read all the time)?
Btw, if you want to know more about legal issues for small software entrepreneurs / freelances, check My Lawyer Gabe
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
The readers of this blog already know that my first attempt at becoming a micropreneur (selling online code-generation services from simple design models) failed while my second attempt (migration services to convert your site to wordpress is performing much better ).
Now, some months after the decision to stop the first service, it´s time to reflect on why it/I failed. This is the first of a simple series of posts where I´ll explain some reasons that, IMHO, explain it together with recommendations to avoid doing the same mistakes. Of course, you can be the perfect counterexample for what I say and if so, I´m very happy for you, but I´m afraid you are the exception and not the rule.
My first advice when selling a software tool/service is to target a “cool” technology. You want to focus on selling your tool not on convincing people that the technology your tool promotes is great for them, otherwise you are fighting the wrong battle. I´m the perfect example. I was trying to sell a model-driven approach for software development where the code is generated automatically from design models. Well, many developers are completely against this idea. They will not be interested in your service no matter how good it is. Even worse, almost no developer will be immediately in favor, which means that you´ll need to work hard to convince developers that the model-driven approach is good for them even before trying to sell them your tool. This feeling is shared by other vendors (e.g. see these lessons learnt in building a mobile development platform).
Instead imagine that you´re trying to sell some kind of agile tool. (Almost) Everybody will agree that agile is good. For whatever reason (not necessarily a scientific one) agile is “cool” and “fashionable” so agile tool vendors don´t need to waste their time convincing people that buying an agile development tool is a good idea, they can focus their energy in convincing people that their tool is better that the competitors. Another example are my “Drupal (or HTML/Joomla/…) to wordpress migration service”. I don´t need to justify why moving to wordpress is a good idea given that WordPress is considered the best CMS in many scenarios so when discussing with clients we can focus on the how (price, needed features,…) but not on the why .
If you liked this post please consider following my thoughts on twitter and visit my other projects: the modeling languages portal, go wordpress migration services and my research rants.
