Rate my web application: Perq | Hacker News Reader

Rate my web application: Perq

perqworks.com

27 pointsmatterco15 comments

With regards to pricing: I think you may want to simplify that. In particular, from the perspective of an organization with 20 employees, there is no difference between an HR expenditure of $20 per month and $100 per month. $80 is rounding error on a single employee's overtime pay. (Seriously. Compare the cost of your system to, e.g., payroll systems.) However, you have four plans which attempt to make distinctions between non-distinct things.

Assuming you're in the right range on current pricing, I'd be thinking more along the lines of:

Free for 3

$20 for 10

$100 for 100

CALL for more

Now you only have to administer three options, and if you convert anybody with 20 employees you win much bigger.

Note the CALL option. There is an awful lot to be said for the CALL option in enterprise sales. Realistically speaking, price is not going to be what prevents your solution from being adopted at large corporations. However, and this might be a bit of a shocker for you, they might not deal with variable pricing that well. (It is easier to get my boss to sign off on 2 * $X,000 per year than to sign off on twelve payments which will average out to $X,000 per year. Think of how much extra work that makes for him in working the company bureaucracy. First he has to attach a projection. Then he has to document how he made the projection. Then he'll remember "Oh, shucks, if this ever materially changes I'm going to have to update the projection, but updating projections doesn't bring in my projects or get me my next promotion.")

Incidentally: you list a bunch of features, not benefits, on the front page. Nobody, not even HR drones, wakes up in the morning and says "You know what I want to do today? Create office holiday schedules!" Let me hum a few bars: decrease costs, increase compliance with company policies, reduce workplace conflicts stemming from miscommunication about leave.

I don't understand how you can say $80 is a rounding error, and then suggest pricing tiers that that have an $80 gap. My brain started clanging with cognitive dissonance!

Also, I think advising him to have a "Call for more" option is bad advice. Don't introduce that kind of friction at the 101st users - that's not right. Maybe, just MAYBE, he wants to say call for 1000+, but even in this case, I think it will be better to be transparent about pricing.

Sorry for the clanging. As I indicated, I think that the correct anchor for this pricing is "HR expenditures" (like payroll) not "cheap web services anybody in the organization can start using on their own initiative as long as they have a credit card". (Why do I think that? Because I think you need HR buy-in to sell any plan costing more than $20 / month, so you might as well charge them through the nose to let them know you're serious.) However, I was focusing on the need for simplification in that point, so I picked price points that they demonstrated they'd be more or less comfortable with charging for my example.

I would be interested in hearing your reasons why the CALL option is "not right". Here are my reasons why it is:

As it stands currently, they will not sell any plans whatsoever to companies with 100+ users. Not a single one. The reason is that when you get to 100+ users you have just won yourself a ticket aboard the USS Enterprise Sales. There are now a few hundred obstacles standing in front of the sale where there weren't when you were selling to a man who routinely invites all his employees over for dinner. If you haven't done Enterprise Sales before, you don't know what these obstacles are yet. So, let the prospective customers who you're going to crash and burn trying to sell to tell you what their objections are.

For example, hypothetically suppose one of my day job's customers was looking for a solution to this, and you took my advice and had them call you. Here's the first question they're going to ask: "What is your policy for compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act?" And the answer presumably sounds like "Umm... let me Google that." Now, let's be honest: you're going to totally crash and burn with that sales call. But you've learned something useful: a) there is a Personal Information Protection Act and b) somebody who was interested enough in my software to pick up the phone/send an email/etc asked about it first, which means that presumably my answer was important in making a buying decision. So, presumably, if you got it into your head "I really want to sell to Japanese universities" you'd a) research the law b) implement the technical and legal measures you'd need to comply with it and c) prominently say so on your website. Then, the next time someone called you and (having totally failed to read your site in a manner typical of all customers everywhere) asked about the Personal Information Protection Act, you'd have an answer ready to go, so you could get totally humbled by their second question this time.

Repeat a few dozen times and you might actually succeed in making Enterprise Sales.

(Edit: I had misremembered the English name of the law I cited.)

This is cool. Sounds like you hit on an annoyance that HR managers/administrators have probably be struggling with for a long time. Especially for the companies large enough to have a headache, but not large enough to create a custom software solution.

Care to share some info on how this was created? Some of the technologies behind it, how long it took you, any insight would be cool. Would also love to hear how the launch went - e.g. a nice blog post with some interesting follow-up statistics on all sorts of HN related metrics would be nice to see.

I like how easy it is for me to know immediately what it is and what problem it solves.

Me, personally, I find the green on white copy - right below the main centerpiece of the main page - a bit hard on the eyes. Maybe that green could be a SHADE darker - so there is more contrast?

Just being nit-picky here, I feel like some of the copy is a bit wordy and some of the word choices are a bit awkward. E.g. 'Personable Time Off'....what on earth is that? After looking through the site, I get what you are going for, but I am not sure if that is the best way to say it.

The interface definitely looks nice though, and for the most part the copy is relatively easy to read.

I am also struggling to decide whether or not there is too much information on the main page. At first, I was like 'Whoa!' this is a lot, but I realized that you are just saying the same thing many different ways without me knowing you are saying it many different ways until I understand everything - if that makes sense. So I guess in a way it's good, because before even moving from the first page I understood what the app is about, but I would have preferred if the same could be explained without so many words.

Just my $0.02.

This is beautiful. And the main site is built on top of Wordpress? Impressive.

A couple tips:

* Make the writing on your blog (and your other pages) more colloquial. And enable comments on your blog. Feedback is incredibly valuable to a newly formed company.

Example on the main page: "For over seven years, Matter has developed 'better experiences' in products and services. Perq comes from our own fruitless search..."

should be: "Perq was inspired by our own need..."

* Not so much text on the main page. As another commenter said, I don't want to see a list of every feature that you provide. If I'm interested in your product after the first page then I'll want to see a detailed feature list.

* Take the pop-up that comes up when you click "View Details" on the Tour page, and embed it into the page. Put it front and center and let all of the other text fall below it. It's very close to a demo and it speaks much louder than pure text.

* On the homepage, everything below the masthead feels superfluous because it's so bright and small.

Argh! Tiny white text on saturated green. Tiny light green text on white. Tiny grey text on grey stripes. Also way too much text.

Also be careful with serif fonts. Sure, they are trendy but usually they are harder to read on monitors.

Shouldn't "3 for Free!" rather be "Free for 3!"?

It looks very nice, but the only thing I'd say is that I'd hate to have to distribute YET ANOTHER username/password to everyone on staff, even for a small firm. It would be cool if there was something that could just use email or if it could integrate with LDAP, etc.

Put a huge button on your home page that lets users straight into the actual application without any signup. There are so many sites that require sign up (I know yours is only 3/4 fields), it becomes off-putting, no matter how minimal.

Just make it so unbelievably easy for people to start playing with your app by just letting them use the thing immediately. Then, you can do all sorts of conversion stuff to turn visitors into users with an free/paid account etc.

Also, there are both 'Signup' and 'Join Account' buttons on the homepage. The only way I could understand what 'Join Account' meant was to hover over it. Why not just have one signup button, then as part of that process determine if the user wants to join an existing account. This way the user only has one choice and no ambiguity.

It's looking really great. Nice work.

For large companies, you're competing with peoplesoft. Peoplesofts UI is shit, in my opinion, but then I'm only the guy trying to book his holiday with it, rather than the HR people who bought it. What it offers them is an integrated solution. I assume it plugs into payroll etc. It also does expenses, yearly appraisal, yadda yadda. I don't know how you're going to compete with that.

I like it a lot. I am looking at a solutions that would help us to track time off (not time tracking itself). Perq has very attractive pricing (10x cheaper than other solutions, I am looking at tracking time off for 50+ employees). Design is very nice and smooth. Good work!

About the light green type: darken the green text until the average color of the block (type + white background) matches the current color of the text

I found 'Signup' and 'Create Account' confusing. You may want to work on the text to avoid confusion.

nice design and clear product selling point especially in usability area.

Consider that middle-aged managers are probably not eagle-eyed - light green text on white is not ideal, as already pointed out.

A very few may have a fond thought to give to a former holder of that name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ

P.S.: the 'Works with' part is more important than the out-of-the-way corner where it is tucked ...

nice

Reply on news.ycombinator.com