bdunn

36 ms·

271.
by bdunn 14y ago
Bingo. Why bother coming up with a business model for your ahem business when you're hoping to get a hiring bonus when Facebook buys you - I mean, selling your company.
272.
by bdunn 14y ago
Absolutely. brennan at planscope.io
273.
by bdunn 14y ago
Patrick, I've recently doubled my pricing across the board. To confirm Ruben's results, no change in trial/paid conversions. Next step is disconnecting from "usage" (right now, plans are based on # of employees using the software, all plans
274.
by bdunn 14y ago
You can't compare something that requires a critical mass to be useful (app.net, Facebook, Twitter) with issue tracking software. B2B products, like bug trackers, can carve a niche and do rather well with just a few hundred or thousand paid
275.
by bdunn 14y ago
You're an inspiration! All of my paid customers (90+ so far) all know I have no plans to ever take outside funding. Once you do that, you're no longer accountable to just your customers.
276.
by bdunn 14y ago
While I like this, the problem is that there's no way to correlate discussions and attachments with a particular task when using a spreadsheet. The saving grace of most issue trackers is that they usually come with comment threads, which ma
277.
by bdunn 14y ago
As in $XXX or $XXXX I'm also so focused on subscription revenue that I forgot to clarify that. Get a few $XXXX/month businesses and you'll have six figure annual revenue before you know it.
278.
by bdunn 14y ago
I wouldn't ever consider building a product for consumers. Why? * Businesses are used to paying for services. * Businesses can typically make judgements about the ROI of software (X saves Maggie 5 hours a week. That translates to $200 in pa
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by bdunn 14y ago
I've only had issues with one client, who is a national non-profit with procurement, etc. The risk for the client is that you'll flake out. If you have a track record of being reliable (When I'm subbing out work, reliability and professiona
280.
by bdunn 14y ago
I bill hourly, and now only do prepaid work. Shameless promotion, but invoice issues are the reason I wrote Planscope ( https://twitter.com/brennandunn/statuses/226414132566585344 ). The more I can drill into client's heads that time ==
281.
by bdunn 14y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but in my contract my attorney specified an interest rate of 1.5% per month for overdue invoices. That at first seemed absurdly low to me - I wasn't dealing with thousands of receivables. This was probably my only client,
282.
by bdunn 14y ago
SF was also predominantly RubyMine last I checked.
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by bdunn 14y ago
This especially applies to bootstrapped products, where the only recipient of the profits is probably you. Micro-niche could mean only ever getting 1000 customers to pay you $30 a month. Even if you had a few thousand a month in expenses,
284.
Dropping jQuery UI, and Refactoring Backbone.js Views(planscope.io)
45 points by bdunn 14y ago|4 comments
285.
by bdunn 14y ago
As a new solo founder, who also gave up running a consultancy to build a project management product ( https://planscope.io ), this post REALLY resonates with me. A lot. I'm bootstrapped, and don't ever plan on outsourcing anything - except
286.
by bdunn 14y ago
This post makes me really appreciate that I have sane working hours and don't live in a big city.
287.
by bdunn 14y ago
This reminds me of an email I got from somebody questioning how I could get away with charging $12/mo for my project management app, since the true cost of storing the few hundred or so database records a given account might use is so minim
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by bdunn 14y ago
Hampton Roads, please!
289.
by bdunn 14y ago
A lot depends on the kind of clients you want. If you want to be subbed out work or hired short term by an existing development team, marketing your persona, maintaining a technical blog, and other things will definitely help. But if you're
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by bdunn 14y ago
Just be sure to have a call to action encouraging people to join your mailing list at the end of each blog post. Cheers :-)
291.
by bdunn 14y ago
I think you're unjustly attacking solo businesses by saying that we're a bunch of geeks afraid to talk to people. You can definitely scale in headcount and try to build a Freshbooks or Harvest and have millions a year in revenue, or build a
292.
by bdunn 14y ago
If you set a precedent that your product is free, no one who's signed up will ever pay for it. Charge right away.
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by bdunn 14y ago
Actually, you can market before you've written a line of code. Ideally you've figured out some pain point that Instahero will solve, so why not pitch that? "X sucks, and we're doing something about it" Write a sales letter. A great example
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by bdunn 14y ago
Component-izing Backbone views is a fantastic idea, and something I'm doing pretty frequently with Planscope. Your average jQuery plugin has you modifying state via invoking the plugin again on a selector with like a string argument that re
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by bdunn 14y ago
I don't think anyone's ever subscribed to a SaaS product because it used X technology over Y. I also think you're way too focused on the tech and the list of features, instead of selling a solution. You can say all you want about invoicing
296.
by bdunn 14y ago
These are the sort of posts that keep me coming back to HN. Great analysis, and as a former Crossfitter - awesome product idea!
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by bdunn 14y ago
This is why I tend to use paid services. The incentive to shut down services that make money is a lot less than those that hemhorrage cash.
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by bdunn 14y ago
Rails on the backend, Backbone on the front
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by bdunn 14y ago
Launched https://planscope.io late February. Netting about $1100/mo profit after server costs.
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What Southern Charm Can Teach You About Your Startup Product(planscope.io)
2 points by bdunn 14y ago|0 comments

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