jagthedrummer

dalke, I said "some parts of my business" because I run several different business of various types.

Since the book focuses on value pricing for consulting projects it's obviously not applicable to the SaaS that I run.

However it's been fantastic for my software development/architecture consulting.

I recently completed at project for a client where I used the value based approach from the beginning of the sales cycle and very early on identified the real goals that the client had in mind and was able to work with them to identify a dollar amount that they wanted to invest to fix the problem. We agreed on that amount and I went to work. After completing the project my effective hourly rate was around $600/hour, and the client was extremely happy with the results.

(I know you're not a fan of the term "effective hourly rate", but it's the best term I have to talk about that concept since I didn't agree to an actual hourly rate with the client.)

Had I gone with my old process of saying "this is my hourly rate and I'll track hours" it's doubtful that the client would have agreed to $600/hour and I would have made much less on that project.

I don't think Jonathan meant to use "laborer" as a slur of any kind. I think he's trying to get at the distinction between being "a pair of hands" on a project, who is told what to do and how to do it VS being "a brain" on the project who is operating at a higher level of abstraction to identify problems, propose possible solutions, determine which solution is best, etc...

Those are two very different things, and the advice in the book would be MUCH harder to apply if you are filling a "pair of hands" role.

Hope that makes sense and answers your questions.

I highly recommend this book. The author, Jonathan Stark, really knows his stuff when it comes to pricing. His advice on value based pricing has changed the way I approach some parts of my business.

Thanks!

Does anyone know if Foundation addresses the issue of how to handle the migration of existing users from the pre-foundation version of the interface to the post?

I'd be interested to hear what you move to, what the set up looks like there, and what you pay for it.

Sure, no money has to change hands, BUT if you decided to take the hours that you would spend moving projects away from Heroku, and instead do something productive that creates value for a client you could be spending the same amount of effort, and be making more money than you'll save by switching.

Here's an analysis of how these rumored changes will affect apps of various sizes.

http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-o...

tl;dr : Current paying customers will see a discount of up to 30%. Current freeloaders will have to pay $84/year for functionality equivalent to what they get now.

Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST $84/hour for their time, meaning that they'd need to move to a new solution in less than an hour to save money. All the hand wringing is very silly.

Lemme guess, you're a developer/sysadmin/techie type? :)

This is a tool for people who don't want to be anywhere near a command line.

Hmm... I hadn't considered that view before, but I can see where you're coming from. The intention (for me) definitely isn't to extract extra money. Rather I'm hoping to provide something that provides enough value that it's a core part of my customers workflow, and worth using every month. I honestly hadn't given much (any?) thought to trying to do one-off documents until you suggested it. I'll definitely be mulling it over.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Nope, edits do not count towards the total. You can make as many revisions as you want to a given document. At this point there's nothing to stop someone from doing exactly what you describe. I'm mainly counting on attracting customers that value their time enough that they'd find it silly to expend time and effort gaming that particular system.

I think it depends on what sort of rate you're able to charge as a consultant/freelancer. If you're anywhere near $100/hour (or more) you could very easily waste more time/money by trying to do it yourself.

Ah, crap! Thanks for pointing out the broken link. Here's the input document for the demo.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jagthedrummer/213b8a787b3...

Under the hood is Pandoc/LaTeX. Pandoc flavored Markdown is what is supported at the moment.

Also, if you know any designers capable of producing a LaTeX template, please put me in touch!

If you're comfortable managing that kind of tool chain, then yeah, that's a good comparison. Many people would prefer to focus on creating the content of the document rather than installing and configuring software.

One of the main reasons this is a SaaS is that all of software that is part of the processing pipeline required to produce documents of this quality can be very hard to install and configure properly. This is aimed at people who would rather be creating documents than wrestling with a DIY approach. Being a SaaS also means that people can access their documents from any device that has a halfway capable web browser. There's nothing to download, install or update.

Ah, yeah, I need a better message about images. They work fine if they're at a fully qualified URL.

The final output is indeed tweakable and there are 4 totally different templates to choose from.

I always encourage people to go with whatever system works best for them. I'm glad you have something that you like. :)

There are plenty of people who like Markdown who don't want to manage a document production tool chain. This is aimed at those people. Folks who like a DIY approach should definitely take that route if it works for them.

Here's a page where you can see most of the templates available. http://www.remarq.io/articles/new-templates-now-available/

I should probably make a gallery page and link it somewhere prominently.

Thanks! The per document pricing is an interesting angle. I'll definitely give it some thought.

Thanks! I think this is a good suggestion. I should definitely feature a real document more prominently somehow.

Think about the price in comparison to hiring a design consultant to generate these reports for you. If they charge you or your agency $50/hour, it takes them an hour to design a report, and you're producing 10 documents/month, that's $500/month.

If you're happy working in Adobe / Word yourself, that's awesome! I built Remarq as a tool to help freelancers and consultants generate high-quality, beautifully designed reports and proposals _without_ needing to invest in a designer for them.

This is aimed at being exactly the opposite of DIY. If you're into DIY and it works for you, that's great! You should do what works for you. Many people don't want to spend time with a DIY approach and would rather go for a "done for you" solution.

Thank you!

I don't have Word export on the immediate road map, but I'm not ruling it out. Sorry I can't give you anything more specific than that.

Thanks for being an early tester, and for the kind words, Kai. I'm excited to see how Remarq can help more people.

Oh no! I'll take a look and see what went wrong.

Thanks for being an early tester!

Definitely needs a name change. This was an incredibly poor choice and makes me question whether I could ever feel comfortable using the software of an entire organization that is capable of making such a poor choice. Especially since they admit that they knew it would be confusing.