Application Generation - Business

Why Would I Buy From YOU?!

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:30:00 -0400

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!

Selling in a Budget Based Purchasing Environment

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:30:00 -0400

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? . . . [More]

What Are You Paying for with a Web Application?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:35:00 -0400

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" . . . [More]

It's not about what you build, it's about how much it costs

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:30:00 -0400

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 . . . [More]

Better, Cheaper Faster Semi-Custom Apps

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:35:00 -0400

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 . . . [More]

Pricing, Production Costs and the Implications of Application Generation

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:01:00 -0400

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!

Online Accounting Software - What Do You Use?

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 07:07:00 -0400

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 . . .

Should the Word "Just" Be Banned in Client Communications?!

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:47:00 -0400

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 . . . [More]

What We Won't Fixed Bid

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:46:00 -0400

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? . . . [More]

Estimated vs. Actual - Do you KNOW How Well You're Doing?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:46:00 -0400

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?!

How We Charge Projects At SystemsForge - What Would YOU Improve?

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:16:00 -0400

In this posting I want to look at the "least bad" way we've come up with pricing projects over at SystemsForge. Any input on ways to improve the approach would be much appreciated! . . . [More]

Including Edits/Tweaks in Fixed Bid Project Costs

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:30:00 -0400

Do you pay your clients to be bad and penalize the clients who are the easiest to work with? I've noticed this amongst a lot of companies that offer fixed bids. We used to offer pure fixed bid projects where we agreed a fee to deliver an application including any reasonable tweaks required. The problem (of course), is the definition of reasonable . . . [More]

Hourly Billing - Is it Unethical?! :-)

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:40:00 -0400

Of course, many industries bill on an hourly basis, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that it sets up conflicts of interest that are difficult to reconcile from a commercial perspective when developing web applications . . . [More]

Lean Software Development and Process Improvement

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:40:00 -0400

Lean software development is an increasingly popular part of the Agile universe - its best known advocates being Mary and Tom Poppendieck who have written a couple of books on the subject and who also write papers, present and consult regularly around the world on the topic (I was lucky enough to catch their presentations both at Google in NYC and at XP2008 in Limerick, Ireland this year). One of the many interesting ideas to come from lean is a focus on minimizing WIP (Work In Progress). In the context of website development, WIP is projects that have been started but have not yet been deployed. This makes sense as if your main resource is billable hours, any billable hours spent on a project that is not yet completed increase your working capital requirements assuming that - like us - as a business, you get paid for completed, working software - you don't just get paid each month simply for spending hours. (If you do get paid for time on incomplete projects WIP is still a problem, but it's your clients problem - not yours!) So, if you do get paid on a project basis, the question is, how can you minimize WIP? . . . [More]

The Importance (to us) of Project Tracking

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:30:00 -0400

The idea behind the theory of constraints is that it can often be helpful to look at a business as a "value stream" - a set of tasks that are performed that add value to your clients. And that at any given point in time there is a single limiting constraint that if you lifted it, would improve the business the most. Think of a water pipe. If you want to pump more water through a pipe without having to increase the pressure, you need to find the narrowest part of the pipe (the obstruction) and widen it. Widening the wider parts won't increase the flow - you need to find the primary obstruction and lift it. Then you will have a better flow and will find a new primary obstruction that you can work on lifting. Similarly with a business, you look at which part of the value stream is currently at full capacity or otherwise stopping your business from being able to increase the quantity of projects you're undertaking and if you remove that limitation, that is the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of the business. Every business will have a different limiting constraint at any point in time. For a software consulting company it could be things like their capacity to sell projects, spec them, build them or test them. For us, where we often have 20-30 projects live at any given time, the limiting factor is project tracking . . . [More]