7 ms·

Please take this as constructive: I pay for your system for a team of about 10 people. It works and it's been useful to us - but as soon as I get some free time

• flylib 13y ago
  Google has their own similar internal software called Snippets that instead of nightly sends out an email once a week, collects responses and sends out a digest along with a web app interface explanation of software: http://tech.pro/blog/1490/how-it-works-google-s-snippets http://tech.pro/blog/1490/how-it-works-google-s-snippets some former google engineer rolled out an open source version of the software that with some factoring, nightly cron jobs instead of weekly and potentially a cleaner user interface for the web app could prolly fit your needs https://github.com/kushal/snippets https://github.com/kushal/snippets
  • zach 13y ago
    FWIW, I've used http://www.snptz.com/ http://www.snptz.com/ off and on since it debuted on HN some years ago for weekly snippets. I've since developed my own daily forward-looking/backward-looking format, essentially a simple text-based mashup of David Seah's inspiring productivity forms: http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/ http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
    • flylib 13y ago
      interesting never seen http://www.snptz.com/ http://www.snptz.com/ before, did it work pretty good?
      • zach 13y ago
        It did for my needs. It's super-simple, yet you can choose to use it just via the weekly emails or the web interface. It's open source as well (in Python for App Engine): https://github.com/tedpower/snptz https://github.com/tedpower/snptz Looking at the code, I noticed it actually supports teams, a feature I've never used but that looks quite functional.
    • gknoy 13y ago
      Thanks for linking David's stuff, that was something I didn't realize I needed.
  • jkaljundi 13y ago
    http://weekdone.com/ http://weekdone.com/ is a service allowing this via web, mobile and e-mail as well. There's even a Google Snippets template. (disclosure: I am a co-founder at Weekdone).
• smalter 13y ago
  Definitely constructive, thanks for this.
  • 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
    I don't use your product, but I feel like the poster above doesn't apply the correct value to your product. You are helping 10 of their employees. 5$'s is a small fee, 2$ is a small fee. Neither breaks the bank. Set your price point at what you're conformable with. Not to the idle promise of "I can do this, so it should be cheaper". They're underestimating the work/effort of creating it and the value it provides.
    • louthy 13y ago
      You're right that it doesn't break the bank. It just feels overpriced. I am not underestimating the work/effort that goes into creating it, I am very aware of the effort required. My primary motivation for using it in the first place was because I was too busy to write something like this myself, and for that the price is fair - my time is worth more right now. But I don't think a system which sends out email reminders and logs daily text updates is $600 per year software, sorry. The author is clearly perfectly entitled to keep the price at whatever level he likes, and I wish him all the luck in his endeavour.
    • nickconfer 13y ago
      Agreed. Most businesses actually don't care what a service costs if it does two things.. 1) something useful they need 2) cost is low enough that they don't need to get approval
  • nickconfer 13y ago
    A/B test pricing changes if you do anything. Most companies have a problem of undercharging for a service, not overcharging. Keep in mind your dealing with programmers on Hacker News, but most non-programmers don't think anything is necessarily simple or easy to recreate. Great job, and good luck on future sales.
• asanwal 13y ago
  Dear iDoneThis team - do NOT lower your prices [1]. As a fellow subscription revenue biz, we've found that lower priced plans invite customers whose support requirements are much greater. And you won't make it up in volume. Real businesses that value their time will spent $50/month for a service that saves them time without thinking twice. Your early traction proves this out. The graphic you had in your post about developer thinking makes me think you guys already know this, but I see the lower price advice a lot on HN, and almost always, I think it is the wrong advice. [1] - This is obviously 100% opinion, and you know your business 1000x better than I do. BTW, our product's subscription price point is significantly higher $12k per annum at the low end, and we just moved this up from $7500 earlier this year. BEST DECISION WE EVER MADE.
  • tagabek 13y ago
    I second the notion to not decrease your prices. There may be a few people that have the time and are willing to produce their own alternative product, but iDoneThis is definitely worth the cost (probably even more). As with many subscription products, I feel that iDoneThis will become the product that business owners get used to paying each month.
  • graeme 13y ago
    Seconding this. In consulting or SAAS work I've done, the trend has been the same: low priced customers generate the highest levels of support, send the largest amount of unreasonable requests, and produce the most headaches. None of this is a dig at the grandparent comment. Just a general tendency. Produce something of value, and people will pay and be glad to do it. The whiners will go elsewhere and you'll be better for it. (again, NOT a dig at the grandparent. There's an actual class of whiny users that vanishes when your don't pander to them)
  • kansface 13y ago
    Clearly some price point is too high. Why do you think the current pricing is below that threshold?
    • akbar501 13y ago
• prawn 13y ago
  I can see both sides of this. Perhaps a solution is idonethis not charging per-user? $10/mo for a small team seems fine. $50/mo for a small 10-person business would certainly put me off if I had a team that size. $20/mo would compare more favourably. As a point of comparison, I pay $600/yr (same amount @louthy pays for idonethis) for Xero which is my accounting system. It does reconciliation for multiple banks accounts, statements and invoicing with templates, handles payroll for up to 20 staff at that account level, enables remote and auditable participation from my bookkeeper and accountant, has extensive reporting, etc. I could not build even a simple replacement for all that functionality for less than a few years worth of $600/yr in time.
• wmboy 13y ago
  I reckon $1-2 per month is way too low if they already have paying users at the $5 per month rate. ...but perhaps they could offer discounted pricing of say $4 per user if it was paid annually ($48/user/year instead of $5/user/month).
• clarky07 13y ago
  I think a much better solution would be to not charge per user, and to make it tiered. This is the type of thing that could be useful to teams of different sizes, but it doesn't add more value for more users really. Paying $25 a month for 5 users seems ok. Paying $100 a month for 20 users seems absurd. Just do 3 tiers for like 1-5, 5-20, > 20 users on the order of $19, $29, $49 or something.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • patio11 13y ago
    If you have twenty users for this system, it is likely that "you" pay more than $50,000 every other Friday. (Substantially more if they're techies.) I say "you" in scare quotes because much like software payroll just comes out of a budget and isn't "your" money -- spend it or don't spend it, your call, but either way it isn't in your pocket. Your personal financial situation is influenced in a much sharper degree by whether your unit actually accomplishes business goals or not. If you have 20 employees, many, many, MANY things with less certain value than this software cost you more than $100. Many of them are just costs of doing business which you ignore because $100 is chicken feed and moves no needle at the business.
    • clarky07 13y ago
      Now that is a good point. I still think tiered pricing is a better fit, but perhaps he can make the tiers higher.
    • 7Figures2Commas 13y ago
      > If you have 20 employees, many, many, MANY things with less certain value than this software cost you more than $100. It seems like you're arguing that if you have 20 employees, you're probably wasting more than $100/month on other products and services, so spending another $100/month on iDoneThis isn't a big deal. You might be right in certain cases. Some companies have tighter financial controls and are more thoughtful about managing expenses than others. But as valuable as it might be, iDoneThis is very limited in scope and, perhaps more importantly, is not a "checklist cost" that companies (justified or not) expect to have each month. As such, I think it's very precarious for iDoneThis to depend on the old "companies waste more money on other stuff" non-value proposition. As I noted in another comment, I think it would be wise for iDoneThis to reconsider its pricing model as $5/user/month seems very likely to create agita as the number of users scales. As an example, consider that a Silver Github plan costs $50/month, and can easily support many companies with a 20 person development team.
• tghw 13y ago
  Your time must not be worth very much if you're really considering rolling your own. How long will it take you? A day? You might think so, but no. A weekend? Possibly, but you won't handle all of the corner cases. A week? Getting closer. How much would you pay yourself for a week of work?
  • adamrubin 13y ago
    I had the idea to build something very similar, but hoped to find a pre-existing solution. When I found idonethis, I found the cost prohibitive, so I built it myself. It took me about a week, so that's fair, but that's to rebuild not just the core functionality, but also the multi-tenant SaaS part. I have a 50 person team. So, I would've paid $250/mo, or $3k/year. So, I really invested $2k to develop my own version, which also has the potential to make money if people prefer paying $15 for a team of unlimited users. So, no, I didn't find that a waste of time. Plus, I learned some new things along the way, and can fine tune the app as I see fit. This is the risk of building a business around simple, contained functionality. They're easy to clone, and you better get the execution and pricing right, and figure out how to expand on the concept, or you'll be commoditized quickly.
    • JRFuentes7 13y ago
      I love that you displayed your "innovation accounting" here. I'm wondering, how do you account for ongoing cost for maintaining/updating the software? I've never seen software that didn't require some TLC over time...
• djt 13y ago
  For the people that are complaining about this point of view, remember that this is a PAYING customer who is currently $600 a year for the service. I assume that most people saying not to drop the price are not paying users of this service. I agree that you should not take into account the fact that most people say taht software is too expensive, but I think that you should also take onto account when people would prefer to "roll their own" than pay for your services as it also demonstrates that you dont have a "lock in" effect and so cant charge a lot more than what the product is worth to a customer.
• jmadsen 13y ago
  This is just cheap & short-sighted At $50/month, it would take you a year to recover the cost of building it yourself on your company's dime. A time cost you should be spending on something to increase your company's revenue, instead of trying to save them $600 a year. "I wouldn't pay 2 Starbuck's coffees per month, but I'd pay the price of a cheap cup at the gas station" C'mon, man - everything on the internet isn't free.
• tonylemesmer 13y ago
  Is it not about value? If 50 bucks a month extra value isn't being earned / created by your team as a result of using it, then stop using it :) Or use a whiteboard.