Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. A member of my daily mailing list wrote in with a question about pricing a SaaS application development project when there are many unknowns. Here's what he had to say. Hey Jonathan, I was wondering this. How do you set a price on a project like SaaS application development when there are so many unknowns and so much potential for wrong interpretation of a feature set? For example, is the like feature supposed to just like something? Or can you unlike it? See how many unlikes there are. See who else liked it. And so on. In other words, how do you keep yourself safe from a client who is too picky? Thanks a lot. Okay, so my short answer is, don't work with picky clients who think they know how to do your job better than you. But a longer, hopefully more useful answer is, the client doesn't want a like button. They want to increase engagement so they can sell more ads or decrease churn or attract new customers or whatever desirable business outcome they think a like button will contribute to. Keep the client focused on their desired business outcomes instead of worrying about micromanaging you on individual features. This starts as far back in the relationship as the very first meeting and ideally even before that in your content marketing. In your sales interview with a new prospect, you should establish that they are the expert at what business outcomes they want to achieve, that's their expertise, and that you are the expert of building software that will achieve those business outcomes. If you can't come to an understanding about this, it's going to be a bad fit. Ultimately, it boils down to mutual respect. You won't tell them what business outcomes they should be pursuing and they won't tell you how to write the code that will get them there. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.