Finally we reached $1100 in revenue in 26 days of launch.
We launched our productized service startup on the 20th of June and today we have reached $1k + ($1196 to be exact) in revenue.
The best thing about this is that we have reached this amount with just 4 trial customers.
Another interesting thing over here is that all our 4 customers are from different continents. We have now customers from South Africa, Australia, North America & India. :-)
Although I am making losses with each of these trial accounts, I am confident that we will be converting these trial account into full paid plans from second month onwards.
In fact, 2 of our existing customers have already confirmed that they are going to continue our services and so we now already have $4k of revenue in the pipeline for next month.
The indie hackers community has been very useful to me because the whole idea of launching this productized startup came to me based on the article written by
Robin Vander Heyden on this platform.
I think there is a huge market for creating a subscription-based business of providing services. This guarantees regular income which is usually not the case in service only model.
If you have a service business, I'd suggest you convert it into a subscription model for a limited time to see if it can bring some regularity in income.
Our Website Link: http://xpditesolutions.com/hire-development-teams.html
Well done and keep it up! I can see the benefits of service like this. Questions:
All the best and looking forward to read more positive news ;)
We already have a team of 30 developers recruited. When we don't have projects from clients, we develop our own internal products.
Working in different timezone is not an issue till now as we rotate our office timings to ensure that there is an overlapping of at least 2 hours with our client's timezone.
I think you should make a regular price a bit more visible, to avoid issues with customers.
Also, offer a part-time package (like 10 hours a week or even 5) and I might send you a customer or two.
Part-time packages shall not be financially viable for us in a long term as there is no regularity of income in it.
It is equivalent to freelancing gigs and so not very useful to the company as well as the developers.
How are you marketing this?
We are mostly getting leads by word of mouth and referrals of our previous clients.
Hum... That subscription model is actually very tempting...
Grab one.. :-)
For how long are you guys going to keep the same prices?
Till we get around 30 regular customers.
"In fact, 2 of our existing customers have already confirmed that they are going to continue our services and so we now already have $4k of revenue in the pipeline for next month."
Only if they plan on continuing those services at the new higher price point. If I was them, like any customer, I'd be fighting to keep my current contract rate. Have you already moved them up to the new pricing?
I think you have a very wrong perception of an ordinary customer then. Obviously, those rates are something like "paid trial". This is not SAAS, but hands-on service.
See, it's not feasible for anyone to provide a full month programmer on a cancel any time subscription at a price of $299 per month.
The 2 clients who have confirmed to continue our services already are aware about the prices and infact at a price of $2k per month, they are pretty happy to avail our services.
I know we talked about this slightly in another thread, but I just don't know how this will work for you long term. $2K/month in itself is compelling, but do you realize how much effort and time has to go into managing the relationship to get any work done? Until that can be validated and understood, I think most people with any serious work just couldn't commit to outsourcing like this to you.
I love this idea, but the devil is in the details. But as someone who has spent hundreds of thousands on outsourcing to India and the Ukraine in the past with different companies I can attest that unless the firm has a great employee pipeline, a track record, and loyalty of staff its difficult to want to invest in something like this for anything except small one-off projects. At which point you may as well use Upwork or Freelancer for that.
I'd love to be convinced otherwise. I would rather give money to fellow IndieHackers, but I just don't see that working successfully long term to make an investment in a subscription service for outsourcing. By the time we train the developer up, get him working as part of the team and then delivering any real value to a project they will be off doing something else.
We have been doing outsourcing work for more than 12 years now at a similar or lower price point and we have been able to sustain ourselves for such a long time with always having a 30+ team.
We have built products from scratch for companies who have gone to complete even their IPO(1).
See, the place we are located, a fairly good 2+ year experienced software engineer from a good university will cost us around $1k per month including all employee benefits.
So even if we hire a project coordinator to manage 4-5 projects for client communication, it is still a profitable model for us if the client continues with us for a longer duration.
We don't take all the projects that come to us. We are very selective about the project we take and the clients we work with.
We give sufficient time to our developers for recreation and other healthy activities to ensure they stay with us for a longer duration.
We have several employees who are with us right from the beginning of our company.
Hope that clears all the queries. If you have any more queries, drop me a mail on " milan.m(at)xpditesolutions.com
1: https://www.vccircle.com/bccl-backed-food-marketplace-salebhai-files-for-ipo-on-bse-sme-platform/
Congrats, looks like a winning product here!
Keep us posted! Well done with your landing page.
Use SSL please :) Also, consider getting rid of the .html extensions in the URLs. Keep up the great work!
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