Luca Sartoni – Why the Plumber always wins
September 27, 2015Luca Sartoni gave some valuable Marketing lessons for WordPress Professionals in this presentation at WordCamp Netherlands 2015.
A great article about growing revenue as a Startup, especially with a SaaS product. He talks about a lot of points that many startups get wrong or struggle with, from being too cheap (or free) to early split-testing, what metrics to use and missed marketing opportunities.
And, above all, how important it is to charge for your product as soon as possible:
Charging is a powerful indicator that you’re building something people want. If you’re not charging, you’re likely spending money (development time = money) building features your users don’t really want. People who pay you have opinions about what to build next. Making them happy will lead to more people like them paying you (with this caveat: Don’t build a Galapagos product)
It’s a very refreshing post which debunks some of the popular truisms about pricing or startup business in general. Worth a read.
There are many different options in terms of pricing our services as freelancers. Curtis McHale wrote a post in which he goes through many of them from Hourly, Daily, Weekly to Flat Pricing to Value Based to Conversion Based. I personally used pretty much all of them except the last and i am still experimenting with different pricing options. Here’s what Curtis says about pricing your work by the hour:
Hourly turns the freelancer in to some sort of robot in that it’s about how many hours you put in not how much value you produce. You are simply there to type for you client and that’s about it. The times I’ve had clients try to argue down an invoice is when I’m pricing hourly and they want to know what I spent each minute doing.
While it’s true that an hourly rate can lead to such discussions and some clients may try to argue, i found that one small changes on my invoices as well as my quotes helped a lot in reducing those discussions while still invoicing hours. It’s actually rather simple: I just don’t specify the exact time. Everything’s still calculated the same way, it’s exactly the same hourly rate, and that rate is still declared on the invoice. But removing that column which stated the exact “hours/minutes” shifted the focus from how long i will have for each item to the value each item delivers to the client.