Ditching Hourly

375 Joel Clermont
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Introduction and Guest Introduction
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Jonathan Stark: Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark, and today I'm joined by guest Joel Claremont. Repeat offender. Welcome back.

Joel Clermont: Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan Stark: So, today we are gonna talk about something that we have been referring to as an all you can eat subscription service.

Joel's Background and Business Model Transition
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Jonathan Stark: But first, Joel, can you tell folks a little bit about, a little bit about who you are and what you do, in case they didn't hear our previous episode?

Joel Clermont: Sure. Yeah. I'm, I'm a Laravel developer, so that's the specialty. And I'm an independent developer, and I work mainly with teams that are building SaaS applications. So that's sort of the, the niche that I inhabit.

Jonathan Stark: Cool. And the last time you were on the show, you had not started your current business model, so could you tell folks a little bit about what the current structure of, basically how you sell your services now and maybe a little bit about how that compares to before.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, uh, I, the, I think our last discussion was sort of the journey from hourly billing at my previous business, which was a larger agency to value, price, billing, kind of fixed scope projects. Um, and so since then we've gone through another transition, and again, I say we, it's like me and my partner. But we both each have our own businesses, so it's a little weird.

So if I'm saying we, it's not like the Royal We, it's, it's, there literally is another person, Aaron. Um, we work together, but so we, we made the shift to really going all in on this idea of, we call it a dev subscription. All you can eat, however you wanna phrase it. But the basic idea is that you pay a, a fixed monthly amount.

And it's something like you could turn on and off just like you would your Netflix subscription. Right? So there, there are some other benefits that come to a company that may not need somebody, uh, for a long-term basis.

Jonathan Stark: Perfect. Okay, great. So, uh, there's so many things to talk about here. So I'll, since I have behind the scenes information, I'll sort of throw you some softballs.

Launching the Dev Subscription Model
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Jonathan Stark: When you first launched this, how did it go? Like, what did you do and what was the reaction?

Joel Clermont: Sure. There, there was even a, maybe a step before that. So what, what we had done previously was really focused on larger projects, you know, three to six month projects. And there there's always this downtime where like, after you sell a project, like, well, what do we do next? Right? Like, what, what's the next big project?

Either for the same client or for a different client. And so what sort of cropped up organically was the idea of like, Hey, can you fix a few bugs? Like polish off some rough edges? And so I didn't want to price that, um, value based pricing, nor did I want to go back to hourly. So I said, you know, what, if we just, what's a budget, like anywhere from two to $4,000 for a month?

And we'll just, we'll just kind of tackle these smaller tasks, you know, lower value, but easier to do tasks. And what we'd find is like at the end of a project, almost everybody would opt into that. And so after a while we had a number of these overlapping and it was good from a cash flow perspective, but it was also a little challenging from like a time management perspective.

So that's around the time that I heard about other people doing this subscription model. Just as like, even for doing project work, even for larger projects, maybe something that would take a year or longer, they would, that's just how they priced it. And I thought, well, could we do that? And so we tried it, um, without even making it a public offering.

Just like the next time somebody came to us with a project, I, I said, what? Why don't we try this approach? And I think at that point it was like $5,000 a month. So it was a little bit higher than what we were doing for the retainers. Um, but still wasn't a super high ticket item. I that ended up not working great because we were definitely leaving money on the table and we were slowing the process down, right?

So if somebody hired us for a big three, six month project, there was an assumption, like we were really cranking on it. Like that was the goal. Whereas with these subscription models, we're kind of pacing ourself, like not purposely sandbagging our effort, but like realistically, based on what we're charging, there's only a certain amount of effort we're gonna give you within a certain month.

So. Um, the sweet spot came and kind of getting back to your question was like, I think January, 2024. Yeah. We, we publicly launched our site, no compromises.io entirely focused on the subscription model and we bumped the price up to $7,500 a month and that really landed with a splash, like out of the gate.

I think the first. A quarter, we had way more interest than we could possibly satisfy. So, um, it told me there was something there and there was a number of reasons that people said they liked it, that I, I can get into if, if that's relevant.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Well, let's get there, but not yet. '

Marketing and Initial Success
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Jonathan Stark: cause first I want to know people get all wrapped around the axle with like little details, you know, like, what did you call it? Where did you know, did you place your existing website or was it just like, you know, something you did over email and didn't have a, the website?

So like what, what could you tell people about the launch? Sort of official launch when you first, when it landed with a splash, like what did you do to get that to happen? What led up to it? Were you talking about it somewhere? How were you getting the word out? Was it a podcast mailing list? Social media, just up to the splash point where you're like, holy mackerel, this worked.

I.

Joel Clermont: I, I will say it was some dumb luck, right? It was not. There was no grand marketing campaign behind it. So I mean, we, we did have a newsletter at the time, a lot smaller than currently, so we did share it there. Um, and I shared it in circles. I shared it in social media and I think. It was sort of the uniqueness, like nobody else in the Laravel or maybe even the broader PHP community had done this yet.

So that was like the novelty of it. People were sharing it organically. Uh, we also happened to have, like the creator of Laravel said, Hey, Joel's awesome, you should hire him. And like, I mean, I, that alone, I'm still getting leads to this day where I, I always ask, how did you hear about it? Oh yeah, that tweet, you know, from 2024.

I'm like, okay. Um. So that was unsolicited, but very welcome. And then I, I think part of it too was just other, even other people in my space, like I would call 'em, peers, contractors, other agency owners, they were intrigued by it. And a, a couple of them even sent projects to me, like they had a customer where it maybe wasn't a good fit for them for whatever reason.

And they're like, Hey, try out Joel. He is got a really simple pricing model. So it was, it was sort of a combination of things, but no grand plan behind it.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And did you have the website updated at that time? I feel like you told me at one point you didn't even have the page up yet and people were already buying it.

Joel Clermont: We did. Yeah. So we sold it most of 2023 without an, without. We had a website, but it didn't mention this at all. So leads would come to us just organically. I would pitch them on the idea and they said, sure, let's try it. Um, but then 2024, we, I even hired a designer, like I really wanted, I wanted to make a splash with this.

Um, I didn't really intend to, I didn't know how to do that, but I knew it had to look good and be like an eye catching message and have good copy. So we, we did put the work in to do that, so when people hit the page, it was very clear, like, we know what we're talking about, we're unique. And the pricing was very straightforward.

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Okay, cool. And, and the pricing at the time was, if you recall,

Joel Clermont: 7,500 a month. Yeah. And, and we had a second tier, which I think was. 13,500 like, 'cause there's two of us. It's like if you want us both actively working like two things at a time, then it was that. But very, the vast majority of people went with option one that was 7,500.

Jonathan Stark: Okay.

Client Profiles and Demand
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Jonathan Stark: So people who maybe aren't familiar with the Laravel ecosystem, what, where do you think all this. Demand is coming from. So let me actually ask that a different way. So like, your approach is novel and maybe it unlocked some pent up demand, or maybe that demand would've gone to contractors or something else.

So. Um, to the extent that you can detect this, are these people who would have hired you or someone to do Laravel, kind of no matter what, but because of the novelty and the simplicity of your, your approach, they got attracted away from other people to you, do you think? Or do you think this. Tapped into stuff that would've been pushed off, like, we will get to this someday.

Like it's, 'cause it's more, it feels so far, it feels more mainten, see and small features and can you fix this? Can you add that? Not big projects. So it's the kind of thing that people could defer, like do you have any sense of that? Just through, through conversations with clients that you ended up landing.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, there, there's definitely two profiles. Um, so out of the gate, I would say most of the people were people that would have hired a contractor or maybe even us prior. And, and some of them did have. Projects, like they were launching a new site and it wasn't done yet, but they had a, they had a list of features to build, so they had a clear scope of work and they're like, I need somebody to, to move on this.

Um, so that was sort of one category and, and probably the predominant category to start. But others over the, the years, now that the two years that we've been doing this publicly, um, is, is are people that I don't think would ever have hired us. And these were people that are looking to hire an employee.

And they can't find somebody right now, or they know that it's gonna maybe take 'em three months and they're like, well, I'll just divert this salary to these guys and I'll, I'll keep, I'll keep something moving forward. Like, they don't even have very high expectations for us to, to a certain extent. Like they know we're gonna do a good job, but they're not looking for us to be full-time.

They're just like, I just want to keep momentum while we're looking for the next person.

Jonathan Stark: Right. Okay. So I got, I have to, I'm a, I'm an old PHP guy. I was like

Joel Clermont: Okay.

Jonathan Stark: at PHP five before LAU even came out and. you could tell me, having been out of the, out of the dev game for so long, is there a particular type of client that's, that chooses Laravel over rails or something else?

Or is it, is it really, like, what, why would someone choose Laravel in the first place? I'm wondering if there's any connection or how big the market, I'm just like looking

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: of,

Joel Clermont: I, I, I have no idea. I like, like it's all over the place. You know it for us. There are people that come to us. That just need an app. And they could not care less if we use Laravel or Rails or whatever. Like they're gonna trust us to make that decision. And then there's the teams, they've already chosen Laravel, so a lot, a lot of times I don't ask them like, well, why did you choose this five years ago?

Uh, but so, but it's, it's teams of all sizes. It's solo devs all the way up to like, we worked on teams with two dozen developers on a single dev team.

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Okay. So it's just some choice that they made at some

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Like honestly, I would pick it too, just because I have PHP background, so, okay. So I was just wondering if there was anything special about Laravel that might. Might have enabled this kind of, um, success, but it sounds like it's, you know, it's a framework and people use it.

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Okay.

Managing Client Expectations and Scope
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Jonathan Stark: So the big question on people's minds when they hear about this concept of like, well, well, is, is scope creep to finish the idea? But how do you that to people initially? So when

Joel Clermont: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Stark: A lead comes in, what happens next? Do you have a phone call with them or do they just click buy now? You know, like what happens?

Joel Clermont: Uh, we have had one person put in their credit card, 'cause I have the buy now button wired up to Stripe. Without a single phone call. I've never met this person before. They were in Singapore, they signed up and I'm like, what? Like at first I thought, is this like some sort of money laundering scam or what's happening here?

Um, and it was a fine client. I think we stayed on a few months, but he just liked what he saw. But no, generally speaking. People have some familiarity with us through our work in the Laravel community. Whether it's the newsletter or, you know, I've spoke at the leron conference, which is like their flagship conference.

We have a podcast, so they kind of come in warm. We generally will have a sales call, though, like, 'cause they, they have some questions and I, I'd like to make sure our expectations are aligned. Um, and I, I've sort of refined this over the, the almost two years we've been doing it, which is to, to almost. Weed out upfront if our expectations are way off.

So I might even say to them in the first month, like, what would you consider a success? Like, are we shipping two features? Are we shipping 10 features? Like what does that look like to you in general terms? I know this is very fuzzy, but like, just even the way they answer that and think about it tells me off the bat if, if we have wildly misaligned expectations or not.

Jonathan Stark: Do you get a lot of people confused about the model? Like they don't, they're like, we expected hourly billing or what even is this And Yeah. So

Joel Clermont: Yeah. The, the

Jonathan Stark: do you talk through that?

Joel Clermont: Sure. It, it sort of, it's not like they expected us to be hourly, but the first confusion is like, well, I know you don't charge hourly, but like, how many hours do I get like that? Just all over the place. And so the way I address that. On the website and in our calls is our motto, our our commitment.

Is we ship something of value each week. Now that's still very fuzzy. That doesn't answer the question about hours, but it, it sort of sets an expectation for cadence is like, you're not gonna be hearing from me daily, but you will be hearing from me, me, weekly, right? So a lot of devs will go dark for three plus weeks, and then what did they get done?

Or they'll get, you know, they'll get the time sheet with all the hourly invoices on it. Um, so I'm making that commitment, like, I won't join your meetings. I won't join your daily standup, but we will check in weekly. And something will be shipped to value. So that, that kind of offsets that question. But then we've had other people to the extreme where they, they assume.

Oh, for that price. Like you're working full-time for me, like this happens a lot in Europe where dev salaries tend to be a little bit lower. Um, they j there's an assumption like, oh, for that price you are working full-time. And so I'll, I'll head that off right away too. Like, I'll be very clear. Our website says this is not full-time.

We have multiple clients, multiple projects. Um, but that has been a confusion that's come up more than once.

Jonathan Stark: And so you just sort of talk 'em through it and they either are cool with it or they're not cool with it. And I like that you, you pivoted from how many hours do we get to, well, as many as it takes for you to get something valuable every week. And it, it focuses 'em on the outcome more than the inputs, which I mean honestly is the exact same thing when you do hire someone.

I mean, I've had employees before or managed employees before, and it's like they're getting their monthly salary pretty much no matter what

Joel Clermont: right.

Jonathan Stark: Did they, you know, make our clients happy? Did they ship a feature? Did they build something that was, that's providing value to clients. That's what you really care about and you care a lot less about, you know, how many hours did you put in?

And I don't really want to hear about how you researched something and went down a, a rabbit hole and ended up, turns out it was a waste of time. It's like, just ship something. Okay. And I'll be

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Alright, so how do you, this is a good segue into the question I, I almost asked probably five minutes ago, is how do you.

Manage scope creep. So if you're getting 75, is it still 7,500?

Joel Clermont: No. Uh, at the beginning of this year, we increased it to 9,500 because the, the demand was just way too high. So it's like, well, let's take on fewer clients and, and keep our sanity. And it's still, it, it still is fine. Like we're still full.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And. How do you manage the scope? Like how does it work? So if you just said you're not in meetings, that's great. So that's a huge time savings. How do they get the request to you? How do you manage them? How do you, how do you get the information you need to ship that valuable feature? Every week

Joel Clermont: Yeah, the, the mechanics are pretty. Similar to what we would do if you were billing hourly or working on projects, which is you have some sort of project management tool. Like we, we prefer just using GitHub, which is where we're already working for code, um, code review and, and shipping codes and code and deployment.

Um, they have a whole issue section. It's very simple, you know, it's not full-blown Jira or things like this, but you can have, you can stack up tasks and we just, you put 'em in the order. You want us to do them. Sometimes we'll push back and I'll be like, eh, this task seems a little big for a one week task, or There's not enough detail, or we have questions.

So we usually have some sort of means of communication, whether it's email. Um, if we've been with a client a while, I might even invite them to join, like our Slack. You can have like a private Slack Connect channel, um, or I'm not getting like, the full noise of their whole Slack workspace, but it, it just makes it easier to, to communicate.

Um, or we will have a call like I'm, I'm not opposed to meetings, if there's an agenda that is worthwhile. Um, so we'll, we'll, we'll sit together and, and figure something out, whiteboard it, you know, drop some wire frames, whatever we have to do to, to figure it out.

Jonathan Stark: Who's allowed to put issues in GitHub? Does it, do you not really care and is just whatever's at the top is what you work on?

Joel Clermont: yeah. Generally speaking, we do have a single point of contact, um, and they, they kind of are the, they're the ones, maybe they have more of an opinion who can give us work than I would, you know, as long as it's clear that this is what I'm working on. I don't really care who, um, who dreamed up the ticket or, or who's the one that is responsible for reviewing it.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And. Is the person who's putting, let's say it is a single point of T, is that usually the person who, uh, decided to hire you or do they delegate to someone?

Joel Clermont: Sometimes they'll delegate if it is a bigger company. There's been times where like maybe the CTO is the one that made the hiring decision, and then he'll introduce us to the team and maybe that team has a project manager and now like they're our point of contact. So. That's probably not the norm.

I would say maybe less than 25% of our clients are that size. Most of them. The, yeah, the person that made the decision to hire us is the person we'll be working with as our point of contact.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, and And is that usually CTO or founder?

Joel Clermont: It can be a smaller company. It might just be a dev lead, um, or really small company. Yeah. Like that. It would be the founder of so, or a solo dev. We've had solo devs hire us where they, they built a product. It's successful, it's gaining traction, and they're like, oh, I'm a little outside my expertise. I need, I need some of this stuff shored up and then they'll hire us.

So I, I've been surprised at the, the small size of some companies that have, have hired us. 'cause we're not cheap. Like, you know, even if you break it out hourly, it's, it would still be a pretty high effective hourly rate. Um, so, but it, it still resonates because of the, the, the easy start and stop, I think is part of it.

Onboarding and Project Management
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Jonathan Stark: it, how long does it take to onboard someone? So if you have an opening and they, you know, press that buy button, you wake up on a Monday morning and there's a new client, does, do they have to wait like. Or can you slot 'em in pretty quickly?

Joel Clermont: this was a lesson we learned the hard way. Um, so especially when we first launched this, I think the, the first month we had three people sign up and what I quickly discovered, and this, this does sounds obvious in hindsight, is like, month one is the hardest month for us. Because we're getting access to their code and we're downloading it and we're trying to get it running, and we're understanding the business domain.

And it is just all this ramp up time, even though we're efficient and we're good at it, and we've been in and out of a lot of projects, like it just takes time. So our rule now is we will not onboard more than one client in a month. So if somebody, if, and we always do it on the first of the month because that's another thing too, just from a billing simplification perspective, it's always the first of the month.

So. I have somebody starting new November 1st. If somebody came to me today, the earliest I would start would be December 1st. And it's just, and I'll explain it to them like I, if you want it sooner, I appreciate that. But this is for your benefit. This is not just for me. Um, I just can't, we can't manage onboarding multiple projects in one month.

It's too hard.

Jonathan Stark: Mm-hmm. And how do you, man, how do you, you basically swipe the credit, they swipe the credit card on the first, or like, how do you defer

Joel Clermont: Um.

Jonathan Stark: if they

Joel Clermont: No, I'll, I'll invoice 'em. So like with the exception of the one person who clicked by now, um. We'll, we'll agree. We're can just pick a start time. I will send them the invoice. We invoice upfront, so I'm like, if you wanna start November 1st, I have to be paid by November 1st. Um, so we'll, we'll do all, we'll do some paperwork and I'll even get access to their GitHub or their Slack or whatever leading up to the first 'cause that's real background type tasks so we can hit the ground running.

But yeah, it's, I'll set it up and then FreshBooks, it usually just automatically charges the card. Some, some wanna pay other ways. It's more of a pain for me, but you know, if they want to pay by bank transfer or something, I'll, I'll allow that too. That's fine.

Jonathan Stark: And is it a true subscription where it is auto renewing every month and, and swiping the, the, or charging the payment. Okay.

Joel Clermont: Yeah. Unless they're using like a bank transfer where they have to initiate it. But if they pay through, I guess if they pay through FreshBooks, they could uncheck the box, but I, I don't think anybody has ever done that. They always just let it charge automatically.

Jonathan Stark: Cool. Okay.

Handling Messy Projects and Infrastructure
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Jonathan Stark: Um, so once you, once you're, you got someone onboarded. Sort of at cruising altitude, you got their environment set up locally. Um, has it ever happened that you, that you sort of get into their code base and you're like, woo, this is a mess, or they don't have a dev environment, it, they're just doing everything on prod.

Like what happens in, do you try and sniff that out ahead of time or do you try and say to them, look, I know you want us to work on these things, but the foundation is shaky. We'll go way faster if we can spend a month shoring up the foundation. And then, you know, like how, how, um, sort of architecturally or strategic do you get about the code base?

Or do you just like cowboy code firemen, like let's go patching bugs.

Joel Clermont: Um, yes, we join a lot of messy projects. As a tangent, I've actually found the messier the project, the more value we can deliver easier. Like they're way better clients for us and they're way happier with us. Um, but there is a certain level of quality that we need to operate. So, for example, I can't tell you how many projects we join where the Read Me file in their, their GitHub repo is like the default Laravel read me.

How do I set this up? You know, I can figure it out. So my first pull request will often be, I'm, I'm gonna set this up locally. And ev I'm gonna document the steps. They may be very simple steps, but that's what your read me will be. So the full first pull request is me giving a read me that now the next developer on the team can use.

And there's, there's always like a hundred little tiny things like, oh yeah, you're gonna need this, um, installation key, or this or that. So I'll capture all of that and, and kind of build up some documentation. I don't know that we've ever gone to a a, like we have to take a whole month to do something, but there will be some things that I, I've seen that are broken.

Uh, like, uh, not to get too technical here, but you know, like database migrations, like how do you spin up a copy of the database if I've joined projects where that's broken and they're like, well, we'll just give you a copy of like, the production database and we'll sanitize it. I'm like, no, no, no. We're gonna, we're gonna fix this.

And that, that might take a week that, so that might be week one is like, we'll get your migrations fixed, but then everybody on the project again can benefit from it. So, um, we, we will do some of that, but we usually do it in the context of also working on what they asked us to do.

Jonathan Stark: right. So that you get some points on the board and it's not just, you know, getting ready to do some work.

Joel Clermont: right.

Jonathan Stark: What about, this seems like a little bit longer shot, but what about infrastructure things like, does that present problems sometimes or do you get involved with that at all? Or is that all ironed out these days?

Joel Clermont: We, I believe we specifically say on our website, we do not touch your production environment because we're not trying to get involved in that. And so, um. Because that also implies then you're on, you need to be available for support. Like if it goes down and, and I, I absolutely do not want to be in that position.

Now that being said, some of those business level clients like that don't even know what Laravel is. It's a little different relationship, and they're not coming to us through our website generally. Like they're coming to us through a referral or, or somebody else we know. Um, so we will take on production for them, but then we own it completely.

Um, I mean, they, they own the account, they own the domain and everything, but we own it in terms of responsibility. Like we would monitor it and keep it up to date and nobody else would break it except us. Um, but yeah, if we're joining a team that has ops and all that we're, I, I, I don't want access to production.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And so what about migrate? They, so they already have someone there who's technical enough to migrate things from your environment or wherever you're pushing it to,

Joel Clermont: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: to test and, and eventually. Okay. So, um, cool.

Client Capacity and Longevity
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Jonathan Stark: How many of these sorts of clients can you handle at the same time, the two of you

Joel Clermont: I think last year, um, I think the max we had was about 10 and it, and there's two of us. It was way too much like we got the work done and the clients were happy, but from my perspective, it was way too much context Switching. And I was working more hours than I wanted to work. Um, at, at this stage of my career, I'm, I've, I don't wanna say I'm winding down, but I'm definitely taking my foot off the gas, and so I don't wanna work 60 hour weeks.

Um, so that, that was way too much. Uh, on the low side, we've gone down to as low as like two or three, and like, honestly, that's kind of nice. Like I, if I could plan it. So my summers were two clients, I would, I would take that every year. Um, so the sweet spot is probably somewhere in between there.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And so that's somewhere between two and 10 for two people?

Joel Clermont: Yeah,

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. And how long do clients typically stay with you before they churn?

Joel Clermont: we have had some join literally just for a month. They had something very specific they wanted and that was it. Um, I have a client I'm thinking that is. Like they predated all of this. Like we, we actually transitioned them from the project based pricing to like the retainer model, to the dev subscription through the price increases, you know, so multiple years and, and you know, there's no end in sight.

They're very happy with us. So, um, but I would say the average is probably three to six months.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. That's interesting. I don't know. I don't know what I would've guessed. Honestly, it's, it's an interesting arrangement. What's, uh.

Exploring Client Sizes and Ideal Fits
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Jonathan Stark: On the low end and on the, on the low end, you've said you've had like single solo developers, uh, on the high end, what's the, what's the biggest organization that you've had to integrate with?

And then maybe also what do you think the sweet spot is for in terms of the, the companies? For you, for the, the client's sort of organizational structure and size, like what is the absolute home run for you? Like they've got a product person, but no CTO or, or the founder, you know, so like, do you, do you even know?

Can you answer that question?

Joel Clermont: I, I thought about this a lot because I, I think if I could refine this more specifically, it, it could shape our marketing and, and make us more effective. Um, the, and the other, like the, the, the line I'm trying to walk here is, I think I mentioned this earlier. Is clients that have sort of messy projects that they're not in good shape, they don't have good tests, they don't have documentation, they really benefit from us.

Like, I can come in week one and fix something that they've felt as a point of friction for like years. And it's, it's not even always lack of knowledge that they didn't fix it, but it's just like inertia and like people on the team, employees like they gotta. Sit, sit in meetings and do all this work. And so they're pulled a hundred different directions and I can really like laser focus and just like make the product better.

Um, but the reason I say it's balance is like those are profitable and valuable projects to the client, profitable to us, valuable to them, but they're not the ones I really like working in the most because it, it's a, it, it's hard too, like, it's like you're trying to like find where all the dead bodies are buried and like there's all sorts of dead code that you're eliminating and it's just, it's.

Like, I don't, I don't want to get into like firefighting or rescue projects, but it, it is where we deliver a lot of value.

Balancing Workload and Client Expectations
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Joel Clermont: So, yeah, I size smaller is better than bigger. You know, I love working with a solo founder or a small dev team. Um, the bigger it gets, the more bureaucracy there is. And like in, in a way, it's a little better for us because they, those bigger companies tend to move way slower.

So.

Jonathan Stark: easy to satisfy,

Joel Clermont: Yeah, their expectations are, are, are way lower. In fact, like right now, I do have, they're not technically under this dev subscription model, but I am, I am monthly working for them and they're a publicly traded large company and I might only hear from them once a month. Right. So I, I love clients like that, but I, I have no way of like, figuring out how to attract those.

And I don't wanna market to them, but when they happen, they're great. But yeah, the smaller ones I think are a better fit for us.

Jonathan Stark: How do you, let's, let's get back to the delivering a valuable, uh, something of value every week. Because here's the, the flip side of the, the flip side of this model that, um, the flip side of the scope question for people who are considering this model is, how do I know when to stop?

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: So they, they have a tendency, especially like, um.

Sort of like people pleasers and, uh, just perfectionists. They certainly think like, oh, I mean, if I had, they, they just don't know when to stop, right? Like, like, well, I've got more hours and there's more tickets, so I have to keep going. So how do you, how do you think about that? What would you say to someone who was maybe burning themselves out by just, you know, working 80 hours a week for two clients and there's this sort of never ending backlog,

Joel Clermont: yeah, it, it, it depends on what, what the motivation is for working that hard. You know, I, I certainly in the past have experienced that for a variety of reasons. Some of it is like, you have this natural hunger and drive when you're first starting out, like you'll say yes to anything, just because you're trying to establish yourself and it's.

Jonathan Stark: Right.

Joel Clermont: Like, I think I got 10 years into my career as a solo where I'm like, oh, I don't need to do that anymore. Like there was this realization like, I, I can still do good work, but I, I don't have to that, that desperation or that's probably too strong a word, but like the drive to always sell doesn't need to be there.

So that's, that's sort of one thing. Um, but the other is, like you mentioned, perfectionist. I would even say like just taking qual um, pride in your craft and wanting to do a good job. That that can be a little bit more subjective and we, we still kind of struggle with that balance there. There have definitely been weeks and months where we put way more into a project than we probably should have from a purely monetary perspective or even from the perspective of what the client expected, but it still felt good to us in the moment.

And it sort of bought us some breathing room for future months where maybe we do a little bit less or we're able to do our work more efficiently so we can deliver the same amount with less effort. So it's, I don't, I don't have like a, a strict metric. Um, sometimes it's like, what project do I feel like working on today?

Because that's the one I'm gonna be most engaged with. And so it just have that, that's part of why I like this, the fluidity of the schedule is you can sort of play to your strengths in the moment. And not have to like, watch the clock and, and, and, oh, I gotta hit at least 10 hours for this client this week.

You know, sometimes you go over, sometimes you go under, but as long as they're happy that, that's sort of my, my guiding metric.

Ensuring Client Satisfaction
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Jonathan Stark: How do you know if they're happy? If you're not having regular meetings, like do you, is there enough communication asynchronously that you can tell or like, because there's certainly times when you. doing the work, they're doing something else, and not communicating about the sort of meta layer of the relationship.

You're just doing the, doing the day to day. How do you have like a check-in of some kind on a monthly basis or something? Um, what, what does that look like? So that you know you're keeping your promise.

Joel Clermont: You are right? Yeah, I, most of it is, well, I'll make an exception. So the first month I directly ask them, right, I will check in at the end of month one. Um, because the other thing is too, we give, we give a 100% money back guarantee the first month. So I will check in with them. I'm not asking like, do you want a refund?

But I'm like, Hey, we're coming up on the end. I wanna make sure you're happy. I wanna make sure, like, do you wanna renew for month two? Were you happy with month one? Like I, there's a definite check-in point about three weeks into the project where I, I explicitly make them tell me are they happy or not.

Um, but beyond that, it is a bit more nuanced. And so it is tough 'cause it's asynchronous, impersonal communication, right? You're communicating via Slack or GitHub issues, but. It is, there's enough signals I have found where like, if they're not asking a lot of questions, like, Hey, how's this going? What?

What's this? What's that? You know, clients will tell you if they're unhappy for the most part, but I'll also listen for like positive signals like, oh, that was really great, or. Wow, you got that done faster than expected, or, you know, so and so reviewed this code and they said it was great. You know, like I can, I can look for signals like that.

I probably should check in more explicitly beyond that month one, but I don't have a regular cadence of doing that right now. I.

Jonathan Stark: I heard a great trick. I've never done this, but, but, uh, and I wish I could remember where I heard of it, but the, on the invoice they would send invoices and it was like, you know, your, your bill for this month is 9,500 bucks, but if you feel like you didn't get that much value out of it, you feel free to pay whatever you want.

And then if you get a check for $5,000, then you're like, uh, let's have a phone call. And see if we can sort of correct this for next

Joel Clermont: Interesting.

Jonathan Stark: yeah, I, I, I was like, wow, that is brilliant. That's a good one. 'cause then you don't have to like bother them. You don't have to have a meeting. It gives 'em a really, um, emotionally safe way to kind of express their dissatisfaction, but do what they think is fair.

I, I, I thought I was like, wow, that is really good. Um, let's, let's switch into.

Managing Work and Time Effectively
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Jonathan Stark: How you organize your week. So do you, you don't currently have 10 clients, right? You have, you've got

Joel Clermont: No,

Jonathan Stark: number. Okay. So, but you're full. I, I think you mentioned that.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, we're, we're full. Like we, we decided at the beginning of Q4, like we could use another client or two. And this was mainly Aaron's decision. He, he's a little younger than me. He still has a little more drive and likes sitting at the keyboard longer than I do. He's like, you know what? Let's, let's try to get one or two more clients.

Um, so we're full in the aspect, like we got both those clients. So I do have, we got starting somebody October, starting somebody new November. Um, I'm not saying I would turn somebody away for December, but I'm, we're not actively looking for anymore, um, in the short term, but. Uh, in terms of balancing the week out, we, Aaron and I do have a, a standing meeting on Monday mornings where we just look at, okay, who, who, who are all the active subscriptions?

And I, I'll throw one thing in here too. We will still do a project. So, um, this was something I learned. I, I've kind of like said everything good about subscription models. There are some negatives and one of the things is like we sort of missed having that big meaty six month project where we could go nuts on something.

You know, we could work as hard as we wanted to ship it as fast as possible and make them even more happy. Um, so we will occasionally have one of those overlapping subscription models too. We don't, we don't have anything like that right now,

Jonathan Stark: Is that usually a client that came from subscription or

Joel Clermont: It could be. Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, so they've got

Joel Clermont: fact, sometimes if somebody comes in with a subscription as a subscription lead, and I can sense there's some urgency, like they have something with some scope, like maybe they're like, oh yeah, we have a trade show in February.

Like, maybe this is not a good fit. I would feel better if you have like a target date. If, if we had the freedom, like schedule wise to go as hard as we wanted to, and I'm just not eating all that time. You know, again, it's weird because we're not billing hourly, but, but they get it. Like they get, there's a certain level of effort and so we might steer them toward a project or we've been working with a client for a while and they have a big initiative and we'll just pause the subscription and just like, all right, we're gonna focus on this one project with a fixed price and a fixed scope.

For the next four months and then we'll go back to the subscription model.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. Okay, so, so back to the Monday morning meeting. Yeah.

Joel Clermont: So, so we'll, we'll sort of look at like, I don't, you know, there's four, there's five, um, projects. We have active right now subscriptions and we'll divvy it up like, alright Aaron, which ones are you gonna do, Joel, which ones are you gonna do? And then we'll kind of carve out in our mind like we, what we would consider a successful week, because I say ship something of value.

But that's very fuzzy. Like somebody might have a big feature that's gonna like, I'm gonna have to crank on that thing a week or two to get it into a usable state. And there's other weeks where there might be like a, a potluck of smaller things and I might be like, you know what? I'll do three or four of these.

I'll do five of them, I'll. And just kind of mix and match and so that, we'll, we'll sort of internally shape what we think is a reasonable amount. And I will often share that with a client. Like, here's what we're gonna work on. Like, here's what you've stacked up for us. Here's kinda what I'm aiming for this week.

You know, we'll see where we get. Um, but I, I like to set those expectations. Um, and then, then from that point forward we go forth in work, things always change, right? So, you know, as you, as a developer, you know this, some things take way longer than you expected, right? Or some unforeseen thing. So we might, during the middle of the week shift and like, Aaron needs help with something, or I need help with something, and we'll just adjust to try to make that week a success.

But it, it, it's pretty fluid. But at the start of the week is like the cadence that we set.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And do you typically stick, you know, you with these code bases and him with the other code bases, or do you purposely try and cross.

Joel Clermont: Yeah. That's, that's one of our selling points is that you get both of us, even if you're only doing like the one task at a time. Internally we're knowledge sharing. So if I'm writing code, Aaron will review it before we give it to the client to review. So there's always sort of that internal knowledge sharing and ownership process.

Um, but it also means like if I'm sick or I go on vacation, like Aaron jumps in, even if it is a client where I have the stronger relationship with them or I have more deep knowledge in the code base, any one of us can jump into any other project at at. At a, at a moment's notice. Um, and so that's sort of a, a nice selling point over being the totally solo developer that, you know, maybe they lose interest or they go on vacation for a month or something happens in their life where all of a sudden they're not available.

There's two of us to kind of balance each other out.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And so I don't wanna get too, uh, behind the scenes in the business,

Joel Clermont: Okay.

Jonathan Stark: how do you. You know, you said he's like maybe more interested in sitting at the keyboard longer than you. Do you like internally track your time and divvy up the revenue based on who worked the most? Or you just say 50 50 split and that's, let's just keep it simple.

Joel Clermont: so in addition to this weekly meeting, we have a monthly meeting where we sort of, we'll decide the splits then. Right. And, and again, not to get too detailed, but we sort of have a handful of splits. Like most of the times the default would be 50 50. But maybe I am on vacation that month and Aaron's gonna be working a lot.

We'll do like 75, 25, you know, and so it's on a month by month basis. We, we sort it out. Um, but yeah, it's not tied to ours. It's, it's nothing like that. You know, we, and we try to keep it fair, like there have been whole months, um, when we've had fewer number of clients where Aaron will do all of the development work and I'm just cranking out the newsletter or working on a new course we're trying to launch.

'cause we are trying to build like a product and productized service business in parallel with all of this. And so, you know, we, we'll, we'll kind of divvy that up those ways too, you know, independent of the client work.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, because I, I've certainly seen partnerships go sideways because one person was more, uh, was just honestly working way harder than the other one. And it's not that anyone's being lazy or, or, but like some people, they just want to do.

Joel Clermont: Right.

Jonathan Stark: different amount of work. And so, uh, it, it sounds good to me that you're checking in on a monthly basis.

It's just sort of like gut instinct and like, hey, like what, what does this feel like? Because you have sort of air quotes, non-billable stuff that you're doing too

Joel Clermont: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: to attract leads and, uh, do you know other marketing? So, okay. Uh, so what does the, do you have any kind of like administrative tools for yourself that.

Kind of manage your calendar, like what's your approach? Do you just block out time in the calendar and you say, okay, I'm gonna work on this project here, or that project there. Do you more? I have more like what I do, which is I just have a list of things that need to get done in a given day or week, and I just crank through them when I feel like, oh, this is a fun one to do right now.

I've got energy for this. And I could just can see the end of the week coming. And the to-do list isn't as small as it needs to be, so I step on the gas a little bit. So you're more like,

Joel Clermont: That's more my approach. I, I actually don't know what Aaron does. I, I think he's less on the rigid side as well. Um, where he just kind of like, you get what, whatever. Some things are higher priority. Like there might be a client where I know internally they're gonna meet on Thursday, that's their check-in day, so I might front load them to the front of the week just so to kind of line up with their cadence.

It's, they're not asking me to do that, but we might do that just to. To make it easier for them. Um, but yeah, otherwise I'm, I don't have like, day one as this client. Day two is that client. Um, I, I just, I manage it as needed and I've, I've done this long enough even prior to the subscriptions. Um, 'cause even with projects we had to juggle multiple.

So I've, I've gotten pretty good at having to feel for what to do when, and, um. You know, as much as I hate it, there's always the weekend. Like if I get behind, like I go golfing Wednesday, you know, it's, it's really nice though. It's the last nice day in Wisconsin. Um, then I'll just work Saturday. I don't, you know, it's fine.

My, you know, there's, I'd like that flexibility

Jonathan Stark: Yes. Yes. That's a great one. Like that's. I never, I have never really thought, I don't think I've ever written about that, which means I don't think about it much, is that, like, when it's just great weather, you know, or there's some band in town, or this event during the day on a Wednesday.

Joel Clermont: I want to go with them, right?

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, exactly.

Uh, you know, trick or treating or whatever. I guess that's at night. But, uh, but it's, you can just do it and then, you know, and, and it's gonna rain on Saturday anyway, so just time shifted. It's no big deal. Um, oh, cool. So, all right, so.

Challenges and Downsides of Subscription Model
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Jonathan Stark: You alluded earlier that we've been kind of focusing on the pros of the

Joel Clermont: Hmm.

Jonathan Stark: What would you warn people about? So, so I guarantee you there are people listening to this that are like, uh, I want to do this. It sounds so stable and predictable and wonderful, and um, and I just kind of get to code all the time, which is what I like doing anyway. But it's diversified across a portfolio of clients in this stable income that it sounds great.

So. What, what are the sort of cautionary tales or what are the downsides of it? You know, we already talked about it's, it's not totally obvious how you go on vacation, but that's true with hourly too, you know? So how, so what are some of the other things that people would be like, Ooh, I didn't think of that.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, the, the worst by far is contact switching. Um, and that, that's sort of a factor of how many subscriptions you take on at a time. But I would say when we were doing project work. We'd get to like two, maybe three, and then I'd be like, there's no way we're taking another project on right now. Whereas with this subscription work, you kind of get in the flow and maybe certain clients are really easy, like there's a bunch of light months in a row and like, well, let's take one more on, um, and then all of a sudden something comes up for them, or you know, there's just these things that are, it is harder to predict.

And so I would say err on the side of caution and don't take on too much because the context switching is a killer. And, and even when it's manageable. It is worse than when I would just do like two projects or maybe even one big project. Like I do kind of miss going dark and really focusing on one thing for the whole week.

Um, so that, that is the biggest downside I would say to this model is like you're forced to contact switch at least weekly, if not daily.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Well, that's not that bad. I mean, that's, it's a thing. It's definitely a thing. I have that too. My calendar, my, well, my to-do list is like totally jumbled, but the way you describe it, it's almost like, it reminds me of trying to write two books at the same time. Where, you know, you're like, I'm not gonna work full-time on a book.

I mean, that's like maybe four hours in the morning at the most, but if I were gonna do two at the same time, because then it, what's funny about it is when I have a big project like that, it sort of consumes my background processing in my mind. So like anytime that I'm idle, like in line or just. You know, like someone else is watching tv and I'm completely not, but I'm sitting there and I'm in the back of my mind.

I'm like grinding on whatever the puzzle is, like whatever the problem is be. But as soon as I have two it, it's almost like I can't do either of them. It's weird. It's like, like right now I'm getting ready for my, my a, a big test at karate and it's only like three weeks away and there's a bunch of memorizing I have to do and so there's all of this stuff and it's like it affects. I have like one free background process, process in the back of my mind. And so if it's, and I can't, it has to be like, and, and I can only assign it like a task like once a month and that's the task for the month. And anything else just really distracts. It's, it's wild.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, I can see that. And, um, I, I've definitely experienced that too. Those more cognitive tasks definitely have like a higher weight on you than like the more maintenance or menial things for sure. Um, I, I, another like downside, I, I would say is that. There are a whole subset of clients that will never go for this approach.

I mean, that's that's true even of value pricing versus hourly. Like you're already kind of going uphill in the, in the software development world if you don't do hourly. So, um, there, there are people that if you really wanna work with them, they, they're just not gonna go for this. And I, I've experienced that.

There's, there's people that it was a good fit. Everything else about it was right, and like, they just wanted to do hourly. Like I even offered project pricing. Like, no, we don't want that. And sometimes it was like. They were an agency that they build hourly and they wanted to bring us on for something.

I'm just like, this is not gonna work. So

Jonathan Stark: yeah. Mismatch.

Joel Clermont: you. But that's also a positive too because it, it it, for the people, it makes sense. They really like it because you are fairly unique. There's not a lot of people doing this. Although we have had copycats. I think there was a discussion, uh, you might have been involved in, I found a bunch of people, like we're copying our site literally down to our guarantee and like our.

Testimonials and everything. I'm like, what is happening here? But, um, overall you're unique in, in pricing this way?

Jonathan Stark: yeah. Yeah. I feel like those people disappear quick enough.

Joel Clermont: They do.

Jonathan Stark: what about, what do you think. Again, I'm, I'm thinking of like the listener who's like, this sounds great. Uh, some stability between, you know, so not, like,

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Marketing Strategies for Developers
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Jonathan Stark: not, not as much feast, famine, uh, what can you tell folks about. Your marketing efforts.

You've alluded to a couple of things, but, um, what sorts of things, 'cause you still, people need to hear about you. They need to know that you exist before they can even decide if this is a good fit for them.

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: And you know, over the years I've heard inside of Ditcherville, just like you really have had plenty of leads, like

Joel Clermont: Yes.

Jonathan Stark: So what are the things that, that you built up over time that. Are are sort of paying off now. So like you planted the garden, you tend to the garden and now you're like crawling into, there's tomatoes everywhere. So, but, but what did you do, do you think? What things moved the needle there? Maybe how long did it take before you noticed it was working and you know, where would you start if you were gonna do it?

Do it today.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, I, I get that question from other developers that, you know, that are starting out like, well, how, how do I find clients? Like, well, all right, here's the 10 year plan. I don't know what you're gonna do in years one through nine, but for for sure the, like, the gardening analogy re resonates. 'cause it's like the daily email.

The, the weekly podcast, you know, those, writing a book, launching a course, you know, we, we have a community, you know, just kind of being out there, being helpful, showing, you know, what you're talking about. That is where we get the vast majority of our leads. Like, they heard about us somewhere else and then they became aware, like, oh, I can hire them.

And so like the two things click together and that's where I would say 90% of our leads come from are through those like. Kind of slow, slow channels. Um, and I'm not even putting, it is rare. I put in an email like, you can hire us. Like, I have a PS at the end. And most of the times it's a, it's a free product or it's a book, or it's something else.

It's not our $9,500 month dev subscription. So, um, that's, it's, it's definitely a slow burn, but that has the highest value for us by far.

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Okay. And there's two other things. Um, you might have alluded to one there a little bit, but two other things that work great for devs are to contribute to open source, especially if the thing that you're working on is, um, get well known by the person who started the project and maybe they'll tweet about you, that's for sure.

Um, but contributing to to, to the open source thing that you're gonna. Not just generally like con contributing to like Linux or something, but like to the, you know, to Laravel if you want to have people hire you to do Laravel. And, uh, the other thing that I've seen work for people over and over again is to create some kind of free to what are plugins called in the Laravel ecosystem.

Like gems and rails

Joel Clermont: Yeah, we have packages, PHP packages and some are Laravel specific. Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. So like, so like

Joel Clermont: I.

Jonathan Stark: creating one and open sourcing it. Or, you know, just having whatever it is, like if, whether it's uh, a plugin for, for WordPress or it's a package for Laravel or PHP more broadly and that. Creates a lot that can, if it works, people use it, then you can become pretty well known relatively quickly.

You know, of course it depends on how fast it takes off or people use it. But yeah, doing something, and that's usually super fun for people like talk to devs. They don't wanna spend all day on LinkedIn, you know, connecting with people or whatever. They wanna write codes, so like, how can you write code in a way that's gonna attract clients?

It's like, well build a useful free tool that the kind of clients you wanna work with are gonna use. And then they're gonna find out about you. It's like, oh my God, we've been using this for a year. So, super. That's super helpful.

Joel Clermont: Yeah. We, we do also some, we do some paid advertising. Um, there, there's a very popular site called Laravel News, and um, I think it's over a year now. I've been part, we're a partner with them, so like we're listed in their agency links or whatever. Um. And so this quarter when, when we wanted to get some more leads, I can change what our offer is on the site.

And we, because we've been full for so long, I've advertised a, a testing course or the community or something else. We haven't had our dev subscription on there for a long time. So I emailed the guy and I said, Hey, I wanna switch our ad to our, our, um, our DO subscription. And that was the one that went out in his Sunday newsletter.

And I woke up Monday to two leads booked in my calendar. 'cause you know I have that, that's the call to action is booked now and I'll talk to you. And so like that has been huge. And that's another place I cross post my daily email to Laravel News. So like he's got a much bigger newsletter than me. I think it's like 15 or even closer to 20,000.

So those people are seeing like every day my stuff as well. And then couple that with the ad and it just hit, it hits people at the right time. So it's still sort of hard to predict or control. But it's enough surface area where it seems to, to land more often than not.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah, you've got some levers you can pull.

Joel Clermont: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Cool.

Conclusion and Resources
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Jonathan Stark: Well, I feel like we could keep talking for another hour, but, uh, I, I think this is super inspirational. I think it's a really cool model. Um, it's got some nuances to it, but in terms of predictability and getting to spend your time doing the kinds of things you want to do, it's great.

I think it's great. So, well, thanks so much for sharing that with us.

Joel Clermont: Yeah, happy to do it.

Jonathan Stark: So Joel, what can people go to find out more about, uh, about this or your course, or your mailing list? Where should they go?

Joel Clermont: I'll give two sites, so if you want, now look at our dev subscription, that's no compromises.io if you want to see everything else, which is like the book, the newsletter, the courses. That's, uh, mastering laravel.io. So those are the two main entry points to my world.

Jonathan Stark: Perfect, thanks. I'll put those in the show notes. All right folks. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly. Bye.