I second that, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" is an awesome book and I really encourage anyone who hasn't read it to pick it up some time. I think it is an important read for both developers and managers.
Do you (or any fellow HN'er) have any suggestions about, or personal experience with, trying price elasticity testing for longer revenue models like subscriptions? I will be launching a SAAS soon with a subscription model and am curious about experiences with price testing like this.
Attrition is the name of the game w/any subscription model, and there are lots of variables at play.
Typically for start-up SAAS pricing look at your competitors to get a sense of what the perceived value is going to be of your offering - what category of SAAS are you getting in to?
What will set us apart from the pack will be a much better user experience and an easier to use/smarter toolset for gaining insights on the data a customer is working with. We are also planning on competing on price as we think we can provide more value for a lower price (and a more clear pricing plan) than the other outfits currently out there. I feel like if we are trying to compete on price than we shouldn't be changing them up with something like price elasticity testing, but on the other hand, I wanted to know if anyone had done this with a subscription based model and how it worked out. Perhaps after establishing oneself and getting a decent customer set it would be alright to try out price elasticity testing, rather than trying something like that when we are a newcomer.
You could group us in an SEO/Web Analytics category. For our particular niche service, our competitors pricing schemes are all over the place. Our service is born out of our frustration using the other services out there on a daily basis, so we are rolling our own and putting it out there for others to use.
When you've got the site live drop me an email zl @ myusername dot com and I'd be happy to share some experience once I have a better feel for the service. Have optimized and participated in several SAAS projects of varying scale.
But a few tips:
a) Attrition, again, is the name of the game. Use that as your metric, look at trailing trends. Typically we've observed the highest drops in between the first 3 billing cycles, after that attrition rate seems to stabilize. If you're lucky attrition stabilizes after the second rebill cyle and you can better manage front end testing and customer aquisition strategy.
b) You're at something of a disadvantage w/price elasticity testing w/SAAS because you're going to get press, people are going to hear about you / hear about your pricing and write reviews early. If you change pricing UP, the internets will scream loudly :). Plus you have to worry about current customers getting upset, always implement price changes DOWN accross the board, always grandfather price changes UP to current users (and tell them about it so they feel warm and fuzzy).
A strategy we've used before is to put together a meaningful ad budget for PPC, and test the heck out of the front end pricing. Treat it like traditional elasticity testing, expecting that rebill #s will hold relatively steady on the back even though you can't predict that. The point is to get the highest front-end you can and then work it down, it's obviously much, much easier to lower pricing than raise.
It seems just about any choice is better than godaddy. I have found 1and1 to be pretty decent. Private registration, decent control panel, and around $7 as well.
Hey James, glad to hear from you! Ad Zerk does sound similar, seems like we both had the same itch to scratch :) It is good to hear of another HN'er working on the same problem space. I am sure that our friendly competition will only lead to better products for the both of us.
Deckeo (pronounced deck-e-oh) is a platform that enables you to simply sell ad space on your website, or go big and create your own advertising network if you wish. We are focused on targeted, quality, advertising using a cost per impression model. We think that the The Deck Network and Fusion Ads are on to something with their advertising model of having only one highly targeted, well designed ad on a page. We found that there were not any great solutions for emulating that style of ad serving for our own sites so we set out to create a platform to allow ourselves to do this.
We give you the tools and the infrastructure to create an ad network that targets a particular demographic without you needing to write any code or host any applications. For instance, you could create your own ad network to target a home and garden demographic in the same way that Fusion Ads is a network that targets a design professional demographic. We aren’t Fusion Ads or The Deck Network, rather we enable you to be the “Fusion Ads” for your particular demographic or niche.
We just put up our public facing site yesterday and I am sure there is a lot more we can do to better explain how we are positioned in the market or what makes us different. If you have any more questions or comments, we’d love to answer them.
Working on a new website for a client to help pay for the bootstrapping of my own startup. Getting to mess around with a custom mootools carousel with some nice UX stuff goin on.
I figured there may be some of you who use the Firefox greasemonkey version of this, and would appreciate a chrome version as well. I have found myself using Chrome a lot for my normal browsing and breaking out Firefox for web dev.
