Back in the day, I used to run an ad agency developing marketing materials for small to mid sized businesses. After a while, it became a little dispiriting. For a while I was doing a lot of marketing work for printing firms in Houston (it gave us the vertical specialization to know their business and they were good potential resellers to get us other marketing gigs as they often dealt with marketing contacts at small to mid sized companies). We'd always ask "what makes you different - why would I buy from you", and time after time after time they'd all say "fair price, good quality and personal service" - without ever having specific pricing, quality or service stories worth talking about.

I think it can be the same with web shops. I mean, why would I buy from YOU specifically? We're lucky in that we have the software product line and I've got a fairly good reputation now from conference presentations, published articles and the like. We also have a unique process for building web apps quicker and more cost effectively and are continuing to invest in our systems to improve the quality and productivity of our solutions.

What are your thoughts? What differentiates the business you work for? Vertical industry experience? The quality of your devs (what about them?)? Processes? Systems? Testimonials?

I'd be interested in hearing how you differentiate yourself - whether as a company or as a freelancer and what you find "sells" and what doesn't!

In the last post, I talked about the idea that most website development purchases are budget based. The question then, is what are the implications of this? . . .

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I can get a site just like EBay (only for industry x) for $500. No, really. I saw it on rent-a-coder and everything :-) So, assuming EBay paid more than $500 for their site, what were they wasting their money on?!

As a programmer it's either funny or dispiriting if you look through some of the bids on sites like rent-a-coder. If people are wiling to try to build almost anything for $500, is it time to go back to school and get a law degree? No. Here is why. In my experience, development of websites are an example of a "budget based pricing" . . .

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If you look at many website development shops, they tend to have a price range that they specialize in for their projects. Some shops specialize in small maintenance work and are quite happy to do $100 or $200 projects and to make it up in volume. Some offshore shops will (try to) build almost anything you want for $5k. Many web shops in the US have a "sweet spot" for projects between (say) $5k and $50k, and then there are plenty of businesses that really don't bother with anything much under $100k.

In my experience, it is much harder to change the price point of the projects you sell than to change the cost of building the projects. Confused? Let me explain . . .

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A lot of mid-market apps are going to get quite a bit cheaper to build over the next couple of years. How's that going to affect your business and what are you doing to retool to take advantage of the trend?

Some websites don't need programming at all. Just set up a Yahoo! stores or a wordpress account and you're done. And if you've got (say) $50k+ for some heavy duty custom programming and access to a great team of coders, you can build an application that has an exceptional UI and/or other capabilities that will really differentiate your business. But many web apps fall in the middle - what I'd call semi-custom apps.

They may include commerce, content management, document management, maybe some community building features. There are custom business objects with custom validations and workflows, but there probably isn't anything that unique about the app. It's another cms with custom objects and display templates and integration with your back end document management system or a custom store with simple inventory integration with your mainframe and some funky custom business rules for calculating customer discounts based on their band, the category of product and their total purchases over the last rolling 24 month period. I call these semi-custom business apps and I think they're going to get a lot better, cheaper and faster over the next couple of years . . .

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For classes of web apps it really is possible to substantiallycut the cost of developing them by 3x-8x. I've known/been doing that for years and there are plenty of case studies in the software product line field for these kind of savings for many kinds of software applications. What is more interesting is trying to figure out the implications (if any) to the market for developing mid-market web applications. In a series of postings I'm going to examine some of the drivers and come up with some thoughts about how it might affect the market. Don't worry, I'll be back to technical postings later in the week :-)

Input appreciated!

Right now, we use Quickbooks Online for the US business and a shrink wrapped copy of Quickbooks (the UK edition) for the UK business. What we'd really like to find is an online package that we can use for all of our companies (US, UK and soon Ireland) to keep track of all of the accounts. Ideally a nice API we could use to generate invoices would be nice, although that isn't essential.

Anyone have any recommendations of affordable small business online accounting packages that might be able to handle the multi-country, multi-currency, multi-company requirements without being priced for an IBM or a General Motors?

Any input appreciated . . .

I first remember coming across this a *long* time ago in Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" back in high school, but it seems particularly applicable to client requests . . .

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While we like to provide fixed bids for as much of the projects that we bid, we find there are classes of problems that we tend not to fixed bid. What kinds of functionality or requirements will you not fixed bid? . . .

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One of the many reasons I want to instigate a better project tracking system at SystemsForge is that we don't currently consistently track estimated vs. actuals for tasks, so we're not getting the feedback we need to improve our estimates by seeing how close they are.

We've played with a number of tools, from Excel spreadsheets to Unfuddle to Harvest. but we've never kept up with a given system long enough to get meaningful long term data. Do you track estimated vs. actuals? Do you do retrospectives looking at what caused variances? How do you track actuals in a way that isn't intrusive and/or is actually valuable to the team? We're trying to find that balance between data for measurement and keeping the amount of paperwork and busy work to the minimum. What do you do? How's it working? Would you recommend it? Why?!