I managed to catch Democamp18 last night (or as Joey called it, Democamp “barely legal”) – the place was packed, so I spent the first half just outside the main speaking area with the rest of the crowd behind me steadily escalating the volume of chatter. The net result was Democamp – audio edition (since I couldn’t see the screen) which devolved into Democamp – Charlie Brown’s teachers edition by the end (since I could hear less and less over the noise – apologies to Kosta Zabashta, whose demo of IRC integration in DrProject was probably interesting, but I saw and heard nothing (looks like there’s a screencast though, I’ll check it out)…
One bit did catch my eyes and ears, which was the Blueprint Requirements Centre. It’s some kind of Eclipse specification generating tool that gathers requirements and links visuals together so you can end up with some kind of Choose Your Own Adventure demo for the client that links screens to branching possibilities. I’m totally oversimplifying, and I’m sure it does a lot more than that, but I couldn’t see everything. People at the front seemed really impressed, enough so that they were saddened by the price, anyway.
It costs $10,000. Possibly per seat, I couldn’t hear.
From a crowd that skews towards open source, that got a few chuckles. I heard one person saying something to the effect that they were wasting their time, because nobody in the crowd was likely to be in the market for a $10K product. That person probably thought that the only thing being demoed was the technology.
Pricing models need more exposure – there’s more to life than freemiums, ad supported, and “we’ll make money on the consulting side.” These guys found a market that’s used to paying good money for tools (Visual Studio Team System isn’t cheap either) and made something they’d want to buy. That’s the demo, folks.
Installable software has an edge in market perception – there’s a lot less “how long did it take you to make that” being asked by customers compared to shops that make custom web solutions, where the “how much would it cost me to hire someone to make that” question usually outweighs the “how much value would this give me right now” one they really should be asking. It can be crushing for smaller companies to have to spend 95% of their time trying to grind out enough billable work to cover overhead and then, you know, when they get to it, find ways to innovate and be really valuable partners with their clients.
Here’s a basic concept to get started: you own what you write. Let’s face it, you’re probably going to borrow code from past projects when you work on new ones (why write an email address validator every month?), so be up front about it and start positioning yourself as a solution provider instead of outsourced IT. If the client’s billing department makes you sign a contract that says they own everything you produce, just cross that part out and initial it before you sign it back. It might be an issue, it might not, but if you don’t at least put the concept out there, you’re letting yourself get robbed of any residual value of the work and anything you’ve done might as well have been in COBOL as far as your next project is considered.
Leave a Reply