Tag: business

Simple Product Revenue Forecast Spreadsheet

If you’re selling a product it’s important to be mindful of your financial situation. Whether that be to handle payroll, marketing costs, or building up an emergency fund, having a pulse on cash flow will help you to make more informed (read: better) decisions over time. There are a ton of tools out there, some […]

Posted: September 17, 2019

Pricing Service-based Projects: Part 2 – Hourly Pricing AKA the Unsung Hero

This is the second part in the Pricing Service-based Project series. Check out Pricing Service-based Projects: Part 1 – My Way or the Highway. I spent my first five years of “professional” Web development as part of a team who billed by the hour. Hours were currency, and it was a constant balance between billable […]

Posted: May 23, 2016

Jetbrains: The unicorn Silicon Valley doesn’t like to talk about

It is simple. Jetbrains has the better product. For each IDE that Jetbrains offers, there exists a free alternative, whether its Eclipse, Visual Studio or Sublime Text. Some of these, like Eclipse & Visual Studio even have huge resources behind them. The reason you pay for a Jebrains’ IDE is simply cause it is better. […]

Posted: February 23, 2016

Hustling for the Sake of Getting Things Done

I’m hesitant to write any of this down because it unintentionally comes off as pretentious; as though I’ve got it all figured out. I want to start out by saying that is far from the case. This fact can be verified by those around me, the people in my life. My wife has been a […]

Posted: August 05, 2015

One Question That Will Reveal What Kind Of Coder You Are

Is software development more like building a bridge or is it more like painting a painting? I hadn’t heard this question personally before, but honestly I think it’s a mix of the two. Programming is definitely an (abstract) art form in my opinion. There’s so much to the expression of how code could work, and […]

Posted: July 16, 2015

Improving Your Process: Vetting Clients from the Start

I listen to podcasts every day. Many of them focus on business in a number of capacities, many of them don’t. I found it interesting that two podcasts I listened to nearly back-to-back discussed client onboarding. It wasn’t the focal point of either episode, they each touched on the topic for just a few minutes, […]

Posted: July 07, 2015

Taking Value-based Pricing Too Far

Value-based pricing has been a hot topic for the past couple of years. As is often the case with newer concepts, many people have varying definitions of what ‘value-based pricing’ really is. For some it’s simply a flat rate for a project. For others it’s an in-depth analysis of project scope to determine a market […]

Posted: February 09, 2015

Let’s Kill the Billable Hour

This was a great talk. It covers the history of the billable hour and thanks to the title I won’t be spoiling the outcome when I agree that project/value based pricing is better for us as designers and developers, and it’s better for our clients as well. We need to have a discussion about how […]

Posted: November 14, 2014

Interfaces in need

I think one of my favorite aspects of client work is being exposed to solutions that otherwise wouldn’t be on my plate. Working with clients from many different industries presents us the opportunity to improve an area that (likely) desperately needs it. There is so much talent being dedicated to the latest social-focused-ultra-modern UI in […]

Posted: June 27, 2014

The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company

37Signals successfully navigated the path of going from a design studio to being a software company. In the process of doing that they unknowingly started the mythology that every design or development studio should become a product company. Kevin and I have on more than one occasion sat back and talked about what it would […]

Posted: June 27, 2014