bdunn

13 ms·

31.
by bdunn 12y ago
It actually really shocks me that a lot of invoicing tools that support time tracking still only allow for $rate * $hours invoice creation. I invoice weekly, and end up needing to piece together invoices by hand. (I run a product, Planscope
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by bdunn 12y ago
I can personally vouch for Galen. His front-end work is incredible — looking forward to working with him on Planscope in the future.
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by bdunn 12y ago
Bingo. The email course is the "why", the product is ultimately the "how".
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by bdunn 12y ago
OP here. So, I'm not selling anything in this post. There is a CTA for my newsletter, but that's it. In this post I... * Talk about how I identified a "cash flow" (customers of X, in my case - Infusionsoft.) * Ran a simp
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by bdunn 12y ago
Fun learning about this stuff from Pingdom (OP here.) I'm working onsite with a client this week and just saw someone submitted this to HN. Working on getting the site back up now.
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by bdunn 12y ago
As someone who has a product in this space, some thoughts/ideas: * Not everyone bills hourly. Include daily and weekly rates. * It took me a while to figure out how to add a project when wanting to create a time log. Maybe have a &quot
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by bdunn 12y ago
One of the guys who worked with me was an ex-employee of the university we were submitting the proposal to. It's always... fun when procurement divisions are involved. :-)
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by bdunn 12y ago
I once lost a huge project simply because 1) I charged less than my competition ("there must be something wrong with them...") and 2) I didn't add a 20% annual maintenance fee my the proposal. Needless to say, I never made th
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by bdunn 12y ago
Baremetrics ( https://www.baremetrics.io ) by Josh Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related services that sit on top of Stripe, also.
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by bdunn 12y ago
Jefferson was a part of what was known as "The Republic of Letters". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters Being that most of the leading members of the Enlightenment were geographically dispersed
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by bdunn 13y ago
My company consists of just me, and is fairly profitable. And to reiterate patio11, there are quite a few of us. I detailed income and how much I contribute monthly to each of my income streams here: http://planscope.io/blog
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by bdunn 13y ago
Sure, so whenever someone cancels their Planscope account I send myself an email with their name, email address, LTV, plan, and cancelation reason (this is also stored in my database.) With this, I could simply CC that email to Zapier, they
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by bdunn 13y ago
I've tried just about every web/mobile/desktop todo list out there, and always end up back at pen and paper. Every night, I list out the things I want to get done the next day. I strike these tasks out throughout the day as I
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by bdunn 13y ago
Sorry, should have been more explicit: For most of Planscope's history, I captured credit card upfront. Growth was decent, but I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped that requirement. So I did, and growth plummeted (very few si
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by bdunn 13y ago
Great idea. I ALMOST went back to the safety of CCs upfront ( http://planscope.io/blog/why-im-going-back-to-capturing-cred... ) but ended up sticking with it. And I'm glad I did, because growth is significantly high
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by bdunn 13y ago
When I collected cards upfront for Planscope, I sent out an email 3 days before their 14 day trial ended. The next email they'd get would be an invoice email when their trial expired, and they'd continue to get these emails each m
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by bdunn 13y ago
This is from a while ago, but checkout the script at the end of this post: http://planscope.io/blog/my-most-effective-newsletter-to-dat... This is how I landed many of our clients (I also did a lot of edu-seminars, etc
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by bdunn 13y ago
A rate like that has little to do with "CS complexity" and everything to do with selling a solution that makes the client better off than they were without said solution. I'm in near-rural Virginia and my last hourly consulti
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by bdunn 13y ago
Not necessarily. A lot of Rails contracts tend to be multi-month, and if you play your cards right your rate should be upwards of $150/hr. Doing just one 20-week project a year (FT) could net you around $120k, which leaves the rest of
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by bdunn 13y ago
I self-published both of my books, and originally fulfilled orders through ejunkie but now use Infusionsoft. Revenue is a little over $50k for each book (and growing), and each took about a month to write. I really look at my book as paid l
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by bdunn 13y ago
Chiming in here. Nathan and I both run membership sites that use the same underlying tech stack: a Discourse app that authenticates off a Stripe-aware Rails app that handles memberships and grouping users into cohorts. Unfortunately, just a
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by bdunn 13y ago
This is spot on, and I've seen many a startup fold early on because they bet the farm on launch day. Each time someone new stumbles upon your marketing site - you've "launched". And if they don't convert, figure out
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by bdunn 13y ago
Thanks! And I totally agree. While I like to think project tasks that say "make the logo bigger" aren't as sensitive as, like, bank statement data, I definitely understand the concern. So far, I've had 0 pushback to thes
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by bdunn 13y ago
(Brennan here) I've thought about this a lot too, especially since I'm pretty much a stickler about asking permission to jump into a project before checking out a bug or something for a user. I've made sure to sanitize my das
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by bdunn 13y ago
I know a tool that can help freelancers better plan the scope , priority, timing, etc. of their projects... :-)
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by bdunn 13y ago
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote Looking for a developer to work with me on my product, Planscope ( https://planscope.io ) - stack is Coffeescript/Backbone.js on the frontend and Rails on the backend. Primarily looking for someone
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by bdunn 13y ago
You mean of time tracking? I know Thomas and Amy well, and trust me when I say they're doing quite well with Freckle. And there are much, much bigger fish in the pond. The great thing about building business tools is that the markets t
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by bdunn 13y ago
Companies tend to project stability more than individuals. I remember being a hard ass about ensuring that our office was full of life whenever a prospective client came to visit. Even though my employees could just as easily work from the
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by bdunn 13y ago
It really all boils down to risk management. If you're a self-identified say, "Ruby freelancer", the value proposition is "I am an independent Ruby developer for hire". For staff augmentation gigs or applying for a
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by bdunn 13y ago
Here's the winning formula: * As Patrick mentioned, tap into your CoC's network of local businesses and offer to host a presentation. This will help you seed an audience - you'll later want to host your own events. * Go to yo

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