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Comment by dmlorenzetti | Hacker News Reader

My father worked for a large software company for many years. I remember him telling me how they successfully responded to a Request For Proposals with a much smaller proposal that said, in essence, "You don't know what you're actually looking for; pay us $ to help figure that out before you pay $$$ to build it."

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I do this when I consult. I call it a roadmapping session. It's massively successful. The customer pays a little bit of $$ relative to the total spend to get what they want built.

In exchange they get:

1. A doc outlining what they want built and how it'll be built. This is the key deliverable.

2. To work with me and see if it's a good fit

3. To pay a fraction of the price to de-risk a larger engagement

4. To see if I can deliver on what I said I'd build for them

And I get:

1. To get paid to discover the bounds of their project (vs. writing a proposal for free)

2. To see if they're a good client (pays on time, works well together, etc)

It's a huge win for everybody.

I did that with some customers when I consulted but I think I should have formalized it. It's a win-win for everybody.

Ah gotcha. Thanks.

Oh I have a good story about that! Healthcare software is rife with these sorts of things.

We had a potential client come in saying they had the toughest requirements; terabytes of data would be collected, we'll need PhD data scientists to write very complex algorithms, huge servers to handle the incredible load and uptime needed, full suite of mobile and desktop apps, blah blah blah.

We analyze his requirements a bit and it turns out he needs actually just needs a survey with 5 questions, none of which collected personal information. And he treats 20 patients a year. We call him in, set him up a Google Form in front of him, and sent him on his way. Probably saved the Canadian healthcare system millions on that one.

Looking back on this experience, I think some people are incredibly ego-driven, so the prospect of doing something off-the-shelf or for free doesn't enter their conscience.

'Looking back on this experience, I think some people are incredibly ego-driven, so the prospect of doing something off-the-shelf or for free doesn't enter their conscience.'

I agree completely and have experienced the same very often.

Or sometimes it's just a missing piece of critical thinking - 'Is what I'm doing unique to me, or is it something other people need to be doing as well?'. Most times there are others doing the same things, and that means there's a market probably being served by someone already that you can leverage to meet your needs.

Or down the other path where that question is never asked is the madness of 'fully customizable' LOB stuff, like SAP or Domino.

I have that conversation often in the enterprise apps space, and so frequently the fundamental question just hasn't been considered while everyone rushes towards a horrible custom code nightmare that's entirely unnecessary.

> the madness of 'fully customizable' LOB stuff

An observation from working with LOB stuff: Often software is simply the tool companies use so that they can spend dollars to defer fixing issues with training, procedures, or management.

For example, some salespeople have an incentive to over-promise and under-charge in order to make their quotas and bonuses, which causes problems down the line for the company finances and whomever needs to fulfill those requests.

Rather than changing the compensation structure -- or asking the direct managers to do their job with oversight -- the company decides to spend bucks on software, programming the computer to tsk-tsk-tsk and wag an admonishing digital finger. Since there's no followup or moral suasion, a month later nothing has changed except that the sales team has found different "dump stats" for achieving their goals.

You make a good point about the ego thing. We had several enquiries from customers who would prefer custom development rather than make small changes to their business processes so as to be able to use off the shelf products.

I love that. Exactly. Any more you can share about that story? I imagine customer loyalty or repeat projects after that proposal went up too? There's another post I'm kicking around about how a service vendor I did business with recently basically proposed what I intended. Charged up to my budget. And the project was a bust. And I'll never recommend them to anyone. Tracing back the steps though, if that vendor had said "Look. What you're trying to do might not work. Let's just try something smaller for much less than your budget." I would have gone for it. Then even with failure I would have kept trying with them, and recommending them to others. Too many of us agencies and freelancers try to optimize for the $ on the table now, and we put the long term relationship in jeopardy (the one often worth much more $$$)

We tend to do a 2 phase project plan. With a fixed $ for the initial scoping and finding out the actual objectives and then work on the $$$ after.

Has made our project timelines much more realistic and also a better end product for our client.

We do this as well for our "DevOps-as-a-Service" consulting. We have a phase I discovery session before the build session where we map out different potential solutions and the cost / benefit of each one.

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