The first month of my productized software developement as a service - $10k+/month
Hi everyone!
devcinch.co is my subscription based software development as a service product and I'm really excited with how the first month has gone.
A few months ago I was torn between finding another software engineering contract, taking on a permanent role, or trying something different.
In the end, I decided it was worth the risk to try something new and started to consider other productized services as inspiration.
It became quite obvious that software development provides some unique challenges is this space and it is particularly difficult to scale if you plan to keep up a solo business.
There is a limit to how many customers you can take on while keeping a handle on context switching and maintaining a level of productivity.
Initially I've decided on a 3-5 customer limit with the idea to review over time.
Interest has been really good during the first month, particularly for well defined problems, like performance improvements and codebase reviews.
We have two subscribers and a MTD of greater than 10K so far. The price per subscription is quite expensive but hopefully we can attract a small number of our ideal customers, rather than a large number of customers that don't really fit the way we want to work.
I'd be interested to answer any questions and hear from anyone who is providing similar product.
Hi Mark, I saw your product table! You calculate 500€ per day generally.
I have 2 questions.
Hi Mark, the design looks good except for the FAQ section. The green color is hurting my eyes. Not sure if it is just me or if the same is happening for everyone. But yeah this is a suggestion I can give.
Good luck with the business.
Hi Mark, nice to meet you. I am comparatively new here. I am also trying to do a similar thing but instead of request based approach, I am planning to go for "Team on Subscription". Idea is to provide teams of 03 (Product Manager, a Senior dev, a junior dev ) to early stage startups on a fixed monthly cost. Since you already have some experience with a similar model, would love your input on this. Best of luck.
I think the idea in general is good.
The experience I've had so far when talking to customers very much indicates that 80% of "start-up" clients are going to be quite budget restricted, so hiring out a small team might be a challenge for them.
The flip side of that is that larger clients might already have a team in place, so they would rather just supplement that with one person than a small team.
If you can find the right customers among the noise I think it could work.
Hey Mark, thanks for your quick reply. As for the budget restriction, I am planning to charge something between $2800 - $3200 per month for a team. Do you think this pricing is comfortable for early stage or seed stage startups?
I think it will be comfortable for some and uncomfortable for others, its just about trying to keep that ratio in your favour I guess.
That's awesome - excited to see someone getting some early traction outside of the design-focused space.
Thanks!
Really inspiring! Planning to do the same for Shopify development!
That's amazing! Good luck!
Looks good! I was thinking of doing the same, but with a lot less flexibility. I'd use the same tech stack for all customers. New projects only, not existing codebases. Only one way to request changes (probably Trello). Strictly no synchronous communication. It wouldn't be suitable for everyone, but I think there would be enough customers who could work within those constraints (e.g. startup founders wanting their MVPs built).
Yeah, I can understand that. That is basically what I'm doing, async communication only after the 3 day trial. Which is used as a bit of an onboard/discovery phase.
I'm happy to take on whatever stack and existing projects. The ideal customers for me are just people who have reasonably well defined work and want it done without hassle and without a lot of synchronous comms.
Great job so far!
How are you planning to do the marketing for future clients?
That will be a learning process for sure, all my experience is on the technical side.
The first thing I've started to do is make sure I'm more active in places that can act as a proof of authority on the topic.
I've run some ads on LinkedIn and Facebook with varying results. Facebook results in lots of leads but it is unlikely they will ever convert.
Wow! well done, this is great. How did you get your first couple of customers? Totally agree with finding a few ideal customers over loads that are not a good fit, wishing you all the best for the future.
I contact people I'd worked with in the past, mostly something like:
A handful of people replied with things they would really like to resolve but didn't have capacity right now, and it went from there.
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