RailsBizCast

What if your clients are busy executives having a great idea ?  More often than not, you will find few  things common between them :

• Future of the project is directly proportional to the stability and strength of their job. What if they lose their job or decide to move to another company. The time gaps created due to such activities reduces the project momentum and sometimes result in project termination.
  
• Less time is a blessing in disguise. Because they have less time, you will find meetings that are very focused. Compared to a client who pings you after every 15 minutes on skype, that is a much better situation for developer.
  
•  Overall project size is small.
•  They usually know their domain and what they are doing. You don't want to work with a real estate agent who is creating a web app for hospitals during his free time. Match their job profile with what they are trying to do. If you see a lot of similarities in their day job and their dream project , there's a lot less risk in investing more time in that

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

A lot of developers and consulting firms think that doing exceptionally good work is the only way to make a client happy. But, I think this is not always the case.

Sometimes, for example, a client asks for a small feature that technically requires a lot of effort due to its nature or complexity or architecture of the application. And, after putting some serious drill, when developer completes that, the client doesn't like the implementation. The client is not happy even after developer puts sleepless nights to make it happen and asks for moving back to original implementation. This is just one instance. There are many instances due to parameters like process or communication etc that even after a lot of really good work, the client is not happy at the end of project.

I think its very important to track client happiness along with project success. Having a weekly retrospective to gather regular client feedback is an important step. It can be some very small issues to bigger issues within the project.  You will be surprised if you regularly gather their feedback on everything related to the project.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

One of our prospective client was interested in starting the project. We discussed the project requirements and had regular communication for few weeks. Our project manager even started the process of story carding.

But, then, I realised that I have committed a major mistake. We haven't discussed the pricing. My bad. Usually, we ask budget range for project very early in the process so that we are not wasting each other's  time. But, somehow, I had no idea about budget in this project. My boss pinged me and I sent our pricing details to the client. The client replied that he was looking for a lower hourly pricing range.

Then,we didn't get any email from client for quite some days. I followed up with him through email and skype. Also, I thought that we have lost the project. Usually we used to get responses within few hours of our messages from this client. And, after a lot of days today, the client pinged back and told me that he was busy with some stuff and interested in moving ahead. RELIEF for me.

Some very important lessons

•  Ask for project budget in early stages of the project conversations. If client is not sure, first help them to have some idea of budget range they should expect.

•  "Client Not responding" doesn't always mean " Client Not interested"

• Be persistent. Follow up once or twice. Usually you will get the feedback.
  

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

Click here to download:

Vinsol_NDA.doc (14 KB)

A lot of clients hold back information when they first contact us. We ask them to sign a mutual NDA. If they have a template ,we review it. In case they dont have any idea about NDA format, we send them our template of simple confidentiality NDA. We found this NDA from Robby Russell of Planet Argon on rails business google group.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

I have been using Phrase Express and it has certainly saved a lot of my time. Prospective clients usually ask for questions which we already know. For eg: What is your process ? or, what is your pricing ? or what is your availability ?  or response to initial mail etc.

A tool like phrase express(there must be a lot of other tools like this) that automate your typing.  You can use it in e-mail, word processing, Web forms and more. So, I have created templates of most of the common emails and I just type a shortcut key on my mail editor. For eg : I just type int# if I need to send interview details to somebody, or add# if somebody needs our office address. And I keep on adding more templates as I find a pattern in emails coming to my mail box. If you spend a lot of time in communication through emails, I highly recommend typing automation tools like phrase express.  Gmail has canned responses feature but I don't like that much.

In this screenshot , you can see one of my template for enquiry related to front end engineering with rails which is usually asked from us. I just need to type vdl# to get this response in my email editor.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

Iphone and vinsol

We, at Vinsol, have been doing some work in iphone development for some time now. While we have done some good work in this area, we have never officially announced our iphone services to the external world except adding few initial apps in our web portfolio. Most of our clients usually ask us for iphone version of their rails applications and now, we have a solid team of 3 developers and 2 UI guys doing some interesting custom development work in iphone development.

Exploring PR

I have been thinking of doing a press release for announcements of our iphone services. PR is no longer targeted towards just a handful of journalists. Now audience of press releases is thousands of people with Internet connections, google alerts, filters, access to search engines, social media and RSS readers who may be interested in our services (web development / Ruby on rails development/iphone etc. ).

There are some rails consulting companies and a lot of rails hosting companies that go for press releases regularly

For eg: Iflexion took part in rails conf 2009.

http://www.pr.com/press-release/194340

or, New Bamboo,UK is one rails consulting company that regularly do press releases.

Options

Using a service such as PRWeb  gets your release onto lots of sites, as well as into traditional media. Their most popular plan costs $200.

Although, there are some free options also, but I am not sure about their effectiveness

http://www.startupaddict.com/blog/small-business-toolkit/press-release-distribution-for-free/343

Apart from that , there are numerous options

- Business Wire
- PR Newswire
- PRWeb
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Leap
- I-Newswire
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log

Notes

• Online PR and SEO -  Press releases give you a lot of search engine love. look at this article for detailed analysis
  

We use skype as a preferred phone/IM to talk to our prospective or existing clients. Also, we use skypeout to call client's phone, if required. 

Skype offers Business control panel which is good for small businesses.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

I recieved a mail from one of my prospective client of ours titled "canceling job". He was wondering about  our delay in analysis for the project details he had sent five days back. I was wondering what he was talking about. After some mail searching, I found that apparently my gmail spam filter had filtered his email thread into the spam which I was waiting from him.

I immediately sent him an apology mail. I am not sure whether we will be to retain our potential client. But, I am wondering how an email thread went to spam folder. Whether I have spammed his email by mistake ? or one of my keyword filter moved into the spam.

We use gmail for organizations in vinsol. And here are few things I do to make sure this doesn't happen again

•  First, I need to whitelist client's emails in gmail first thing. It can be done through by simply adding new email by "adding him to contact list":

• Then, I need to make sure that all my mail filters are not very generic defined. I need to use lots of specific rules rather than a few broad rules. Filtering out emails containing 'orkut.com' is much less likely to result in a false positive than filtering out all emails with the words 'scraps'.
• I need to separate my business and personal mails.
  
• I need to spend some minutes every day to make sure I filter unwanted emails as spam or trash with care. I need to accept the fact that there will be  some unwanted emails in my mail box every day. And I need to make sure that that they don't get mixed up with my important mails.
  

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

We understand that you want to kick the tires before committing. It’s a big decision to select the right development partners for you. Some prospective clients feel that committing to a developer means they have to take a gamble into the unknown for their entire project.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email

Contributing  to open source is an activity which is encouraged across Vinsol. We plan to launch atleast one open source plugin/gem or an entire application every month in addition to fix bugs or patches for existing apps. It helps us to interact with community closer and gives confidence to our team in terms of code quality, keeping up with the new stuff and  popularity.

I have been trying to figure out business issues which developers face while developing web apps in ruby on rails. If you like this blog, you should keep reading via RSS or subscribe by Email