Does anyone need anything?

[11 Dreams]

My employee is off working. I've got things rolling along and I need something to do. Is anyone building up their business that wants some marketing/sales help? Anyone need some ideas? Anyone need some resources?

Let me know. No charge. Just looking to help if you're looking for it but don't want to put up a post about it. I've got nothing to do for most of the day for a couple of weeks and I'd like to do something productive to keep my mind going so I don't pick up any wasteful habits with my free time.

I could use some help! Do you speak a second language? I could use some help to translate my book. If not, I have a lot going on that I can use some help with.

 

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[Johnny boy]

I could use some help! Do you speak a second language? I could use some help to translate my book. If not, I have a lot going on that I can use some help with.

Definitely can’t help with that.

 

[luniac]

My employee is off working. I've got things rolling along and I need something to do. Is anyone building up their business that wants some marketing/sales help? Anyone need some ideas? Anyone need some resources?

Let me know. No charge. Just looking to help if you're looking for it but don't want to put up a post about it. I've got nothing to do for most of the day for a couple of weeks and I'd like to do something productive to keep my mind going so I don't pick up any wasteful habits with my free time.

lol ok,
do you have any ideas to make any of these apps viral

Its All Good Games

Life is a Game, Have Fun!

www.itsallgoodgames.com

 

[Johnny boy]

lol ok,
do you have any ideas to make any of these apps viral

Its All Good Games

Life is a Game, Have Fun!

www.itsallgoodgames.com

The same exact way as every other successful game app is doing on the App Store. Just little mini ads that pop up in other games.

 

[luniac]

The same exact way as every other successful game app is doing on the App Store. Just little mini ads that pop up in other games.

prohibitive budget for that kind of stuff.

 

[Johnny boy]

prohibitive budget for that kind of stuff.

ads are profitable or not profitable....

what does prohibitive mean to you?

 

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[Jeff Noel]

Are you getting the consulting work from that facebook group? Or from somewhere else?

Consulting work comes from the group, referrals from past customers, the podcast we're running, the blog's trafic.

Cannot identify the main magnet right now as the pixel wasn't really setup last year. We'll get better metrics this year. I'll check to find the main source.

 

[Johnny boy]

Consulting work comes from the group, referrals from past customers, the podcast we're running, the blog's trafic.

Cannot identify the main magnet right now as the pixel wasn't really setup last year. We'll get better metrics this year. I'll check to find the main source.

In regards to scaling.

Are you too busy consulting people at $100/hr?

I would stop charging people "hourly" and just tell them the total price and why it's worth it, then deliver on it. People get scared from hourly rates.

If I told my consulting customer from a while back upfront that I charged $500 an hour then she would shit bricks and hang up the phone. But we didn't talk much about price and I just helped her build a gameplan over the phone about how to grow her accounting firm and she sent me $1000. It was just a 2-hr phone call. She thinks it was a steal because the conversation wasn't my hourly lawyer-level cost, but it was about how much more money she's going to make because of me.

So perhaps you can find a way to increase the price of your services easily without doing much different. Just changing how they perceive the value of your time. For example my lawn care company. If I say we charge $60 an hour they think that's expensive. But if they pay $225 a month for 12 months and we visit 18 times a year and spend an hour and a half at the property each visit, they don't mind at all....but that comes out to $100 an hour. The customer rarely does the math right there and figures out your hourly rate, but if you can deliver the perception of value efficiently, you can make a lot more money.

Keep building up the community.

 

[luniac]

ads are profitable or not profitable....

what does prohibitive mean to you?

don't u need at least a 1000 bucks just to even begin testing different ads, A/B split testing, stuff like that. I just dont have that kind of cash for experimenting.

im trying guerilla marketing instead at the moment.

 

[AceVentures]

Your company is location dependent which means your primary focus should be getting attention locally. Your company needs to become locally famous.

I’ve posted about how local business can advertise for free by hosting a party and getting other businesses to pay for it.

Go to the local venue that can hold 200-500 people and get a quote for an event.

Go to local businesses and tell them you’ll get them 200 people to meet with and advertise to for an evening, getting them local exposure. Get them to pay you $100-$200 or so. Get enough businesses to cover the cost.

Go to every church, school, etc. and advertise a free community celebration with food and music.

Pay for the event with the money from local businesses. Advertise your own business for free and be locally known as the party guy who has a steam cleaning car wash business.

Then, host a podcast and invite local influencers on your show to talk about all things in your area, chop up the content into short videos and have them post it on their Instagram pages and you’ll post the content on yours. You’ll get them more attention as well as siphon off a bit of their local audience members and you’ll get free advertising that way.

Make sure you’ve got a “google my business” listing on the maps section.

Make sure you’re on craigslist.

I would get a phone list and send ringless voicemails to all of the phone number in my town and it costs like 6 cents a message. Totally worth it.

I wouldn’t waste a dime on mailing out postcards or that stuff.

Seems... almost too simple when you put it that way. Great stuff man, this is all practical and actionable advice. You're on fire

 

[Monica Rose]

My employee is off working. I've got things rolling along and I need something to do. Is anyone building up their business that wants some marketing/sales help? Anyone need some ideas? Anyone need some resources?

Let me know. No charge. Just looking to help if you're looking for it but don't want to put up a post about it. I've got nothing to do for most of the day for a couple of weeks and I'd like to do something productive to keep my mind going so I don't pick up any wasteful habits with my free time.

Hi Johnny Boy,
I'd love to have you take a look at our website (www.towelsdirect.ca) and let me know what you think but we're in the process of changing up a whole bunch of stuff at the moment and our new website rollout won't be for around 3-4 weeks. We are a wholesale textile distributor, based out of Vancouver, Canada, and sell towels, linens, bedding, bathrobes, and other products. Our customers include hotels, vacation rental owners and property managers, gyms, salons, spas, etc... We also do a lot of custom embroidered products.

Our main market is wholesale, and we have a good mix of smaller wholesale (AirBNB owners, smaller lodges, mom and pop salons, gyms etc) as well as what we call our private banking clients (hotel groups, vacation rental property management companies, boutique hotels and high end resorts). For the larger clients, who bring in the majority of our income (their annual linen budgets average $40,000 to $100,000), my husband and I both do direct sales (call, email, set up meetings, follow up) and have done pretty well there, although it does require travel for meetings, and it's harder to do indirect marketing to these clients because they usually have well established vendor relationships and they haven't heard of us until we call them. However, when we land a new customer in this range, they are usually pretty loyal as they are used to getting average customer service and slow lead times.

For the smaller wholesale market, these guys find us through our website or word of mouth, and come to us looking for what they need. As our website has gotten more traction since we re-did it last year, we've gotten a lot more of these types of clients and while they're definitely profitable, they can require the same amount of time input as a client that is 10X larger. Because we know there is market need, we want to put more focus on growing with these customers and to be able to do that without just making a bunch more work for ourselves, we are working on simplifying our ordering process and adding an online eCommerce store for wholesale customers. Up until now you could purchase a few of our products for retail pricing on our website, but to order at wholesale pricing you had to contact us directly via phone or email, which was great until we got busier.

Sorry for the long back story, but hopefully it gives you some context. Mostly what I'd love your feedback on right now, since our website is still under development, is how to best reach these smaller wholesale customers en masse once our online store is up and running. We get a fair amount of organic search traffic, and plan on improving our SEO by adding some more content (blog posts about choosing towels, linens, thread count, etc) as well as having a go at email marketing campaigns (we were looking at using MailCheat(Chimp)). Any advice here? Again the customers we are going after I would say a decent amount are using Google to find products similar to ours, and others might not be as they're used to purchasing sheets and such from Amazon or even department stores.

 

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[TonyStark]

a hug

 

[poepe]

I have a website I just started which is to teach the few knowledge gained on my journey to the unscripted . Basically its to talk about money and lessons from ideas, moneys, books etc. It's not niche specific as i think everybody needs to know those stuffs.
The challenge now is that i have about 60% bounce rate and my close group ain't giving me a honest review of the website.
I would appreciate if you can take a few to look through and highlight what you feel is wrong and what i should change or improve on. Anyone else that can also check out can please give a honest review too. Thanks
website ---- https://www.richbillionaire.com/

 

[TheFox]

Let’s start with the monetization side. You do the coaching yourself? How does it work? Explain the sales pitch to me. Then we can move into the attention side of the business and how you get people into your “funnel”.

Thank you Johnny boy.
My target market is solo-entrepreneurs. I do the coaching myself. Together with my client we set a SMART goal, have it clear why this goal is important and set a commitment.

The client makes a schedule what he will do each week to reach that goal. Every week we do a check in, a 20 minute call, to see what went well and what went wrong. Next to the goal itself we will check if everything is ok with health, sleep, friends, relationship to remove any obstacles.

The sales pitch:
Move towards your goal. Stop feeling overwhelmed. Stop procrastinating. It is time to have an accountability coach that challenges you.

As a solo entrepreneur it is easy to get lost in the day-to-day tasks. It is time to change that. Do you want to feel motivated, be proud of yourself and see what you are capable off?

Let’s set a challenge together that brings you closer to your goal. I help you focus, hold you accountable and track your progress.

Monetization:
In the future I want to monetize it by making it a membership website where people can track their goals, support each other, get ebooks, courses and do (group) coaching.

 

[Dieriba]

Thank you Johnny boy.
My target market is solo-entrepreneurs. I do the coaching myself. Together with my client we set a SMART goal, have it clear why this goal is important and set a commitment.

The client makes a schedule what he will do each week to reach that goal. Every week we do a check in, a 20 minute call, to see what went well and what went wrong. Next to the goal itself we will check if everything is ok with health, sleep, friends, relationship to remove any obstacles.

The sales pitch:
Move towards your goal. Stop feeling overwhelmed. Stop procrastinating. It is time to have an accountability coach that challenges you.

As a solo entrepreneur it is easy to get lost in the day-to-day tasks. It is time to change that. Do you want to feel motivated, be proud of yourself and see what you are capable off?

Let’s set a challenge together that brings you closer to your goal. I help you focus, hold you accountable and track your progress.

Monetization:
In the future I want to monetize it by making it a membership website where people can track their goals, support each other, get ebooks, courses and do (group) coaching.

Don't you think that they need more than a motivational coach ? I mean you're just going to tell'em to not stop and keep going ? am i right ? or do I have misunderstand ?

 

[Johnny boy]

Hi Johnny Boy,
I'd love to have you take a look at our website (www.towelsdirect.ca) and let me know what you think but we're in the process of changing up a whole bunch of stuff at the moment and our new website rollout won't be for around 3-4 weeks. We are a wholesale textile distributor, based out of Vancouver, Canada, and sell towels, linens, bedding, bathrobes, and other products. Our customers include hotels, vacation rental owners and property managers, gyms, salons, spas, etc... We also do a lot of custom embroidered products.

Our main market is wholesale, and we have a good mix of smaller wholesale (AirBNB owners, smaller lodges, mom and pop salons, gyms etc) as well as what we call our private banking clients (hotel groups, vacation rental property management companies, boutique hotels and high end resorts). For the larger clients, who bring in the majority of our income (their annual linen budgets average $40,000 to $100,000), my husband and I both do direct sales (call, email, set up meetings, follow up) and have done pretty well there, although it does require travel for meetings, and it's harder to do indirect marketing to these clients because they usually have well established vendor relationships and they haven't heard of us until we call them. However, when we land a new customer in this range, they are usually pretty loyal as they are used to getting average customer service and slow lead times.

For the smaller wholesale market, these guys find us through our website or word of mouth, and come to us looking for what they need. As our website has gotten more traction since we re-did it last year, we've gotten a lot more of these types of clients and while they're definitely profitable, they can require the same amount of time input as a client that is 10X larger. Because we know there is market need, we want to put more focus on growing with these customers and to be able to do that without just making a bunch more work for ourselves, we are working on simplifying our ordering process and adding an online eCommerce store for wholesale customers. Up until now you could purchase a few of our products for retail pricing on our website, but to order at wholesale pricing you had to contact us directly via phone or email, which was great until we got busier.

Sorry for the long back story, but hopefully it gives you some context. Mostly what I'd love your feedback on right now, since our website is still under development, is how to best reach these smaller wholesale customers en masse once our online store is up and running. We get a fair amount of organic search traffic, and plan on improving our SEO by adding some more content (blog posts about choosing towels, linens, thread count, etc) as well as having a go at email marketing campaigns (we were looking at using MailCheat(Chimp)). Any advice here? Again the customers we are going after I would say a decent amount are using Google to find products similar to ours, and others might not be as they're used to purchasing sheets and such from Amazon or even department stores.

Website says all prices are in Canadian dollars so it could have a C$ by the prices. I thought it was a mistake because that’s what I’m used to seeing. Just my opinion.

Some interesting tactics I think you could use.

Creating an affiliate partnership with popular content creators that make content for people running their Airbnb.

You need to attract decision makers in the b2b world of resorts and hotels. You could start a travel show where you showcase other hotels and vacation destinations on a YouTube show and try to make it a very high quality show (think of something the travel network would produce) and then interview the hotel owners as you showcase their business. Then the topic of linen supply comes up off camera and you just landed a huge hotel client who you’d never talk to otherwise since they’re too hard to reach with a sales call.

If you want we could talk more about this and give you a solid blueprint on how to go about this because I see it doing very well. Also, in a product business it should involve very little work once the orders are placed so creating a smoother process to handle the volume of smaller orders should be a priority as well.

 

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[Johnny boy]

I have a website I just started which is to teach the few knowledge gained on my journey to the unscripted . Basically its to talk about money and lessons from ideas, moneys, books etc. It's not niche specific as i think everybody needs to know those stuffs.
The challenge now is that i have about 60% bounce rate and my close group ain't giving me a honest review of the website.
I would appreciate if you can take a few to look through and highlight what you feel is wrong and what i should change or improve on. Anyone else that can also check out can please give a honest review too. Thanks
website ---- RichBillionaire | ...Let's talk about MONEY!

It’s just terribly terribly awful. Wipe it away from the internet.

 

[TheFox]

Don't you think that they need more than a motivational coach ? I mean you're just going to tell'em to not stop and keep going ? am i right ? or do I have misunderstand ?

It's more than just motivation. Personally I see motivation as "you can do this!". It's accountability coaching. What I do is, I help people get clear on their goal. Make sure it's measurable and that it has a clear deadline. Than I help them break it up in small tasks. With the weekly accountability check in I make sure that they are doing the tasks they set out to do. It's about improving productivity, focus and seeing progression.

 

[Over]

I am currently in process of creating a Recruitment Agancy. How would you attract customers/companies to start a co-operation with us? Some other ideas than cold calling? What would you do to build a trust?
Additionally could you provide some useful resources/books to improve my knowledge in this subject (marketing, selling)?

 

[ApparentHorizon]

Hi Johnny Boy,
I'd love to have you take a look at our website (www.towelsdirect.ca) and let me know what you think but we're in the process of changing up a whole bunch of stuff at the moment and our new website rollout won't be for around 3-4 weeks. We are a wholesale textile distributor, based out of Vancouver, Canada, and sell towels, linens, bedding, bathrobes, and other products. Our customers include hotels, vacation rental owners and property managers, gyms, salons, spas, etc... We also do a lot of custom embroidered products.

Our main market is wholesale, and we have a good mix of smaller wholesale (AirBNB owners, smaller lodges, mom and pop salons, gyms etc) as well as what we call our private banking clients (hotel groups, vacation rental property management companies, boutique hotels and high end resorts). For the larger clients, who bring in the majority of our income (their annual linen budgets average $40,000 to $100,000), my husband and I both do direct sales (call, email, set up meetings, follow up) and have done pretty well there, although it does require travel for meetings, and it's harder to do indirect marketing to these clients because they usually have well established vendor relationships and they haven't heard of us until we call them. However, when we land a new customer in this range, they are usually pretty loyal as they are used to getting average customer service and slow lead times.

For the smaller wholesale market, these guys find us through our website or word of mouth, and come to us looking for what they need. As our website has gotten more traction since we re-did it last year, we've gotten a lot more of these types of clients and while they're definitely profitable, they can require the same amount of time input as a client that is 10X larger. Because we know there is market need, we want to put more focus on growing with these customers and to be able to do that without just making a bunch more work for ourselves, we are working on simplifying our ordering process and adding an online eCommerce store for wholesale customers. Up until now you could purchase a few of our products for retail pricing on our website, but to order at wholesale pricing you had to contact us directly via phone or email, which was great until we got busier.

Sorry for the long back story, but hopefully it gives you some context. Mostly what I'd love your feedback on right now, since our website is still under development, is how to best reach these smaller wholesale customers en masse once our online store is up and running. We get a fair amount of organic search traffic, and plan on improving our SEO by adding some more content (blog posts about choosing towels, linens, thread count, etc) as well as having a go at email marketing campaigns (we were looking at using MailCheat(Chimp)). Any advice here? Again the customers we are going after I would say a decent amount are using Google to find products similar to ours, and others might not be as they're used to purchasing sheets and such from Amazon or even department stores.

What do you use to generate your mega menu?

Also, the no right click feature, only hurts your customers. These things do nothing to stop other people from copying your content.

 

[poepe]

It’s just terribly terribly awful. Wipe it away from the internet.

Lol thanks for your honest feedback. I would keep it , practice with it and show you again sometime

 

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[Monica Rose]

Website says all prices are in Canadian dollars so it could have a C$ by the prices. I thought it was a mistake because that’s what I’m used to seeing. Just my opinion.

We're going to be adding a currency switcher to the online store, so that customers can select either Canadian or US flag, and the prices will populate accordingly. We originally thought that advertising "All prices in CAD may be a motivator to US customers, but that was based on the assumption that they would know that the Canadian dollar is lower than the USD, and be incentivized to buy. This hasn't seemed to be the case and possibly could have deterred some US customers if they didn't understand or were put off by this.

Some interesting tactics I think you could use.

Creating an affiliate partnership with popular content creators that make content for people running their Airbnb.

This is a great idea! I'd love to hear you expand on this, and will definitely look into it further on my own. I have no experience with affiliate marketing so lots to learn.

You need to attract decision makers in the b2b world of resorts and hotels. You could start a travel show where you showcase other hotels and vacation destinations on a YouTube show and try to make it a very high quality show (think of something the travel network would produce) and then interview the hotel owners as you showcase their business. Then the topic of linen supply comes up off camera and you just landed a huge hotel client who you’d never talk to otherwise since they’re too hard to reach with a sales call.

I appreciate your idea here but I'm not sure it's right for us at least at the moment. Never say never though

If you want we could talk more about this and give you a solid blueprint on how to go about this because I see it doing very well. Also, in a product business it should involve very little work once the orders are placed so creating a smoother process to handle the volume of smaller orders should be a priority as well.

I would love any help you can offer! This (automation) is our primary objective at the moment, and we are currently working long days together with our web developer to make it happen, as we can start marketing like crazy as soon as we are up and running with the online ordering capability. Currently our plan is to use WooCommerce for the cart/store, a shipping app called ClickShip (similar to ShipStation but has access to better preferred rates at least within Canada), and most likely Avalara Tax for automatic sales tax and duty calculator). There are a variety of other plugins/apps that we're looking at, such as Jilt for shopping cart abandonment statistics, MailCheat(Chimp) for email campaigns, and everything will sync with our bookkeeping software as well.

Hi Johnny Boy,

Thanks for your reply! I responded to your points individually above

 

[Private Witt]

Your company is location dependent which means your primary focus should be getting attention locally. Your company needs to become locally famous.

I’ve posted about how local business can advertise for free by hosting a party and getting other businesses to pay for it.

Go to the local venue that can hold 200-500 people and get a quote for an event.

Go to local businesses and tell them you’ll get them 200 people to meet with and advertise to for an evening, getting them local exposure. Get them to pay you $100-$200 or so. Get enough businesses to cover the cost.

Go to every church, school, etc. and advertise a free community celebration with food and music.

Pay for the event with the money from local businesses. Advertise your own business for free and be locally known as the party guy who has a steam cleaning car wash business.

Then, host a podcast and invite local influencers on your show to talk about all things in your area, chop up the content into short videos and have them post it on their Instagram pages and you’ll post the content on yours. You’ll get them more attention as well as siphon off a bit of their local audience members and you’ll get free advertising that way.

Make sure you’ve got a “google my business” listing on the maps section.

Make sure you’re on craigslist.

I would get a phone list and send ringless voicemails to all of the phone number in my town and it costs like 6 cents a message. Totally worth it.

I wouldn’t waste a dime on mailing out postcards or that stuff.

As one who holds events, I can say this post is gold. Very doable. I just can't go to churches and schools with my cannabis events .

 

[Ubu_roi]

Hi Johnny boy (and all the great people here in the forum),

I'm transforming my software development business to get it to Fastlane, and there are so many things I'd like to have feedback on, but it would take ages.

So I'll begin with a very specific issue, which is finding the balance between giving value and receiving fair compensation, which basically means: when should I send a customer f**k the hell off...


The context
I made a software update project for an old time customer (they've been using my software for over 10 years), which they approved. I got it completely wrong, meaning I asked 800€ for something that was worth at least 5 times as much (I did almost the same software update for 10 other businesses, but I hadn't considered some specificities of this particular customer). As it was totally my fault, I still delivered everything, for the agreed price.

During this time the customer was constantly complaining about how much time this was taking, calling me up to three times a day, even when I explained that I was working much more because of their specificities. Instead of 30 days, I delivered in 45.

Now, 4 months after delivery they asked assistance for a bug that came out while using the software. As they hadn't paid yet, I told them I wouldn't give any assistance before receiving the full payment. They prompty paied (same day), and I fixed the bug.

Now after 5 more days, they want more assistance, for a feature that I delivered over 7 years ago. This update would probably take 10/20 minutes to solve, plus 15 minutes to install.

The questions:

I'm totally fed up: I feel I cannot guarantee my software after the 12 month guarantee I always include in any contract I make. But many of my customers understand that any bug should be addressed for free forever.
In particular for this customer, I don't want to deliver this for free at all, and I don't really care if I loose them.
My thinking was applying a fixed amount for any call after the first 12 months (let's say 70€?).

So here's where I'd be grateful for feedback:

1. I'm not perfect, and I can underestimate a project. How can I avoid finding myself in the same spot of working basically for free?

2. Some customers are not willing to pay a fixed monthly amount after delivery. How can I still avoid working for free when they have a problem with the software after the first 12 months? Would you include the fixed amount I mentioned before in any new contract?

3. How do you decide you've had enough: for example: 4 months delay in payment, rude behaviour... how do you address those? (The delay in payment is also partially due to a culture problem we have in Italy: some people consider normal to be late in payments here, but 4 months is really a bit too much. Personally I both hate it and find it totally unethical...).

4. This is a bit more philosophical: how do you decide the right balance between giving value, and requiring a fair compensation?


Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for your feedback!

 

[astr0]

May I jump in?

1. Charge more always. It's tough to increase the fixed price if you can't provide a strong reason that the customer would understand. But raising prices would average out those ups and downs.
2. Yes, paid support after 12 months sounds fine. You're not charging monthly so that's pretty reasonable.
3. One way would be to charge 50% upfront, show the results afterward and deliver only after full payment. Not sure if that can work in Italy though.
4. Hope that Johnny would answer it too. For me, it's about time. I would give the most value I can if it won't take too much time completely for free and even more if it's still doesn't take too long compared to the paid work.

Fixing bugs for free is normal for me, but not adding features, even small ones. I also try to spend more time on the estimate phase until both I and the client see how to software would work. That adds a ton of value upfront and pays out with more accurate estimates and I include the estimate phase in the invoice too.

 

[Ubu_roi]

May I jump in?

Of course, thanks for your suggestions!

 

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[Monica Rose]

Hi Johnny boy (and all the great people here in the forum),

I'm transforming my software development business to get it to Fastlane, and there are so many things I'd like to have feedback on, but it would take ages.

So I'll begin with a very specific issue, which is finding the balance between giving value and receiving fair compensation, which basically means: when should I send a customer f**k the hell off...


The context
I made a software update project for an old time customer (they've been using my software for over 10 years), which they approved. I got it completely wrong, meaning I asked 800€ for something that was worth at least 5 times as much (I did almost the same software update for 10 other businesses, but I hadn't considered some specificities of this particular customer). As it was totally my fault, I still delivered everything, for the agreed price.

During this time the customer was constantly complaining about how much time this was taking, calling me up to three times a day, even when I explained that I was working much more because of their specificities. Instead of 30 days, I delivered in 45.

Now, 4 months after delivery they asked assistance for a bug that came out while using the software. As they hadn't paid yet, I told them I wouldn't give any assistance before receiving the full payment. They prompty paied (same day), and I fixed the bug.

Now after 5 more days, they want more assistance, for a feature that I delivered over 7 years ago. This update would probably take 10/20 minutes to solve, plus 15 minutes to install.

The questions:

I'm totally fed up: I feel I cannot guarantee my software after the 12 month guarantee I always include in any contract I make. But many of my customers understand that any bug should be addressed for free forever.
In particular for this customer, I don't want to deliver this for free at all, and I don't really care if I loose them.
My thinking was applying a fixed amount for any call after the first 12 months (let's say 70€?).

So here's where I'd be grateful for feedback:

1. I'm not perfect, and I can underestimate a project. How can I avoid finding myself in the same spot of working basically for free?

2. Some customers are not willing to pay a fixed monthly amount after delivery. How can I still avoid working for free when they have a problem with the software after the first 12 months? Would you include the fixed amount I mentioned before in any new contract?

3. How do you decide you've had enough: for example: 4 months delay in payment, rude behaviour... how do you address those? (The delay in payment is also partially due to a culture problem we have in Italy: some people consider normal to be late in payments here, but 4 months is really a bit too much. Personally I both hate it and find it totally unethical...).

4. This is a bit more philosophical: how do you decide the right balance between giving value, and requiring a fair compensation?


Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for your feedback!

I'm not familiar with your industry so I dont know if this is an appropriate suggestion, but if possible I would let clients know ahead of time that payment is to be made prior to final delivery/installment of the system. It's amazing how unmotivated people can become to pay for services/products that they've already received. I sell goods not services but I hate getting jerked around for payment so I usually only offer terms to larger customers who have been vetted and underwritten by our insurance company, who is a much greater threat than our own small business.

 

[shubham525]

Alright, given that you're bored, let's throw some ideas around. I jot down a bunch of business ideas all the time, but rather than to hoard them deep in my notes somewhere they may never see the light of day, I'd much rather share them with others. If anything, we can poke holes at where it couldn't work and shoot it down. If it has real merits, somebody out there can potentially benefit from this. Which is still better than these ideas dying alone in the notebooks.

Here's one I've been thinking about, but I can't fully get the story to hold. Let's chat about it and see if it has any legs.

In a nutshell, this is an App that would connect workout buddies. There's an idea like this out there called Gymder, but this model differs from it. It's about connecting people that workout frequently with beginners at prices cheaper than typical personal training. Let's call the fit person the "Bro", and the beginner, let's call him the "Noob". The Bro works out every day/other day anyway. He could buddy-up with a Noob doing his normal workouts, for a small extra cost the Noob brings to the table. Noob pays for a Bro friend at the gym and learns from his workouts, and the Bro gets a nice bone thrown his way without having to change his current plans, he works out every day anyway. Noob jumps in on machine doing the same exercises while Bro is resting, and they rotate as 1-1 gym buddies. Ok, I think this explains the idea.

Now for the revenue model: ideally, your platform would also serve to schedule the Noob and the Bros time together, which would provide a degree of control and management of the services rendered. In this position, you could command a percentage of all hours/bro sessions booked. This is impractical, because what's to hold the Bro and the Noob from making their own arrangements after they link up once? Unless the percentage is low enough that the added convenience of scheduling through this app is worth the whatever percentage you're asking.

Another way to possible extract value would be to charge a service fee for each connection. This service fee would be paid from the Bro's first session with the Noob. This is the convenience or finder's fee for connecting the Noob and the Bro. whatever arrangement they make beyond that is theirs.

How/what else could be done here? Just having fun with this idea - but I really like the sound of connecting these two groups. The fit dude is super passionate, and can genuinely help a noob for cheap, and there's endless Bros and Noobs out there.

Wow that's a great idea. My gym friends are always looking to buy another protein , but being short on cash. They would love to become the bro and earn while gymming. I think it will generate a totally new market for "new generation " trainers with their ratings like " Yelp". Later you can give monetize your app in so many ways. Offer people certified trainers , proteins , machines. Hell , open your own line of gyms.

 

[Vas87]

Hi @Johnny boy, I have a "reference" app which is in a healthcare niche. It has around 15% of the market using it. Currently it's free as I was hoping to build up the user base and then charge the companies who's products are listed there a fee but they don't want to bite. Any ideas on going forward?

 

[Johnny boy]

Hi @Johnny boy, I have a "reference" app which is in a healthcare niche. It has around 15% of the market using it. Currently it's free as I was hoping to build up the user base and then charge the companies who's products are listed there a fee but they don't want to bite. Any ideas on going forward?

The companies are selling on your app? Charge the fee to the customer when they buy it. The transaction has to occur on your app. That’s part of control.