Walling on Your Product

How much energy should you pour into it?

• A brilliant product with no market or execution is dead
• A mediocre product with brilliant marketing and execution will make you money
• Once you know you have a market and can execute, then you can improve your product
• Hiring out construction of your product is a viable option
• Your path to version 1.0 should fall between 200 and 400 hours
• If you’re over 400 hours, take a serious look at eliminating functionality to shorten your time to launch
• Sales website, documentation, marketing, and everything else will be 100-200 hours
• Ask yourself if you have confidence in your product idea and in your ability to market it

Consider Outsourcing Construction

• If you’re coding in your spare time, it will be a stretch to get 15 hours of productive work in per week
• At 15 hours per week, 300 hours means 20 weeks of your free time, or 4.5 months
  • At 550 hours you’re looking at 8.5 months
• Building your own application is more likely to lead to burnout and an early decision to quit
  • If you have a few thousand dollars set aside, you should consider hiring out development
• Stepping away from the code will increase your chance of launching
• The advantage of hiring out is it gives you time to:
  • Write copy, write documentation, focus on SEO
  • Set up PPC advertising, hook up payment processing, etc.
• If you have some basic project management skills and can scrape $7k together, you can:
  • save yourself a few hundred hours of coding,
  • get to market faster, and…
  • focus more time on marketing

Pricing

(Please remember that Walling’s book was released in 2010)

• For products that aren’t going to make or save someone money,
  • You’re going to have a tough time charging more than $29 once
  • …or $14/month
• For consumer products that will make or save someone money,
  • You’re going to top out around $49 flat, or $19/month
• For small businesses, you’re going to top out around $400 or $99/month
  • …unless you solve a serious pain
• Get a sense of your market and of the price it will bear
• Find out how software is typically purchased by your buyers,
  • …how they will pay for it, and
  • …how much they can purchase without approval
• Compare to similar markets
• Lean towards higher pricing. Developers tend to undervalue their software
• Use three tiers
  • Multiply by 2 for your middle tier
  • Multiply your middle tier by 2 for the top tier
  • Make each of your three prices (the dollar column) end in a 7, 8 or 9 and be sure they all end with the same number
  • Ensure that as your price doubles from tier to tier,
    • …you provide more than double the benefit
• Don’t be confident in your numbers until you’ve tested them
• You should test your pricing to determine how far you can push it
• If your sales cycle is less than 1 week, change your pricing without notifying anyone
  • Leave it running for 1-2 weeks, and compare your results

Markets/Models

• Advantage of marketplaces:
  • High likelihood that users will accidentally discover your application
• There is still a thriving need for desktop applications in several areas
• Plugging functionality holes in the application of a major vendor will eventually backfire should the vendor incorporate your functionality into the main application