luckyisgood's comments

There used to be "just a book" option before at $49 if I remember correctly, that's when I bought it. So I'm pretty sure Nathan's decision to remove that option is intentional, or an experiment of sorts.

The book is really good; however, I would not have bought it then if I had had to pay $180. Is it worth it? Yes, if you're 100% absolutely certain that you want to create a business around a book.

Preserving rich formatting would also be nice.

Wow, you filled a huge gap I could not believe I couldn't find a solution before, and I've searched.

All I ever wanted to do on my desktop is this:

1) Select some text on the screen 2) Have the text AND the URL to the source copied to one place, without me having to manually copy and paste the URL.

I am a huge fan of collecting random clippings from the web. Your app saves me just enough clicks to make it worth while.

Thank you for implementing Markdown export.

I suggest you add one feature: the ability to not have to confirm the save - frictionless saving. Just save everything to one default place, don't have the app ask me anything.

What this and all other software projects need is marketing. There is just too much noise out there. We landed on a comet last year and we still needed marketing to let the people know about it. If we invented free energy tomorrow, we'd all hear about it via some sort of marketing. Marketing is much, much easier to implement than cultural and structural change.

Charging more is only half the work on escaping feast and famine cycles when you're a freelancer or an agency. A while ago, I wrote a post to my inner circle of email suscribers about one sure way I've found that works when it comes to charging more (here's the email article: http://logit.createsend.com/t/ViewEmailArchive/r/3991C04F56F... - hint: saying "just double your prices" does not work for everybody, like andy_adams discovered himself; I've got a better way - increase prices gradually and with every project.)

The second half of being satisfied with your (freelancing or agency) career is having abundant recurring revenue. I recently analyzed revenues, market size and the number of employees per company for ten or so related industries: graphic design, web design, domain industry, hosting industry, digital advertising agencies, advertising agencies, website creation software industry... The numbers told me that graphic design and web design companies cannot even afford to hire a second employee - on average. All the other industries, who are known for relying heavily on recurring revenue, had much healthier business indicators. For example, the market in the U.S. for web design / web development is seven times bigger than i.e. the domain name business, but domain name companies are in much better shape, financially.

I've described my experience with implementing recurring revenue services in my webdev agency in the book I wrote: https://www.simpfinity.com/books/recurring-revenue-web-agenc... - I now firmly believe that charging more + having recurring revenue is the answer to most freelancers' troubles. As soon you upgrade your attitude to charge more for your work, you're ready to start thinking about earning money from existing clients, every month. We've managed to pay for up to 90% of our monthly expenses solely with recurring revenue.

How about you offer your client that it would be YOU who would help find another person for that other project for your current client, so you form a team of two? If your client is not a developer or a technical person, it's 100x harder for them to find a suitable person for the job (and I hear you: you wouldn't want to work with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee either nor should you lower your standards). Whatever needs to be done on that task, chances are you would be an ideal dev lead / project manager / senior dev for that task on that project. You could present yourself as a partner on that project who would do some of the work, but that way you'd be slowly moving away from coding and more in the direction of managing / strategic consulting. That way you can demand more money because you're adding more value, and you'd be responsible for the other person. Recognizing good dev talent is hard, that's the hidden value that many developers forget that they bring to the table.

And yes, networking helps. I have my own small "mastermind" group and the best thing I get out of it is inspiration, bursting my own bubble I have locked myself into, and decreasing fear of the future. I just wrote about it yesterday on my personal blog, so that part of your comment rang very near and very true to me.

In the end, you already know what to do :) I see from your comment that your direction is clear. Good luck with everything!

It depends on what you want to do next and from which sources you want to build your recurring revenue. Building recurring revenue before quitting the client or venturing in a product business is the key.

Let's say that your one current client is like having a day job. It's wise to keep them if they're your only source of income, until you find more exciting and equally / more profitable sources of income.

A couple of ideas:

- try to get a couple of new clients, but only a few, so that you can manage them. Put them on a retainer and service them yourself for starters. Repeat until you have enough money from that on retainer. Aim for fewer clients at higher retainers.

- hire a person (as an outsourcer, or paid by the hour, or similar) to help you service the existing client first and the new clients later. Keep training that person so that there's less and less manual work for you, and keep overseeing everything she/he does (be the quality control person). This brings you closer to a real business (other people do the work, you sell and negotiate deals)

- let's say that you now have one colleague that does the work, and a couple of clients who pay just enough consulting to make you feel relatively safe. Let's say that you've organized this in a way that leaves you 50-75% free time to work on The Thing You Really Want To Do. Now, do you want to build a professional service business, or a product business?

In any case, if your work is the only source of income and you can't raise any capital (not even from friends, fools, and family), building recurring revenue streams first is how you get out of any rut, because getting out of the rut requires freeing up your valuable time first.

Does this make sense? Would any of this work in your case?

It depends whether every web dev / web agency should do this. If the agency grows big enough to hire an administrator (in-house or outsourced), and the agency is capable of adding value to the hosting service, then why not. Customers love to get everything at one place, but you really need to be able to resolve issues. For example, if the agency serves as a glorified email forwarding service between the hosting provider and the client, then there is really no value in this, the agency is only wasting clients' time, and the client would be better off dealing with the hosting provider directly.

In my experience, small agencies (up to 20 people) usually cannot afford or justify giving substantial resources to web hosting. My agency is now fairly small (five people), and web hosting is so complex and fast-growing, that we decided not to deal with it. We found a good partner a few years ago and we refer some of our clients to them. Some of our clients do pay hosting to us, but it's more of an application hosting type of service (they rent apps from us and pay annually). We have our own dedicated server on which we only allow websites we've developed ourselves. This is a legacy thing: we've been doing that before and we're still billing some of our past clients for app hosting, but stopped selling any new web hosting.

If I was starting an agency from scratch today, I would steer away from web hosting and let the specialized partner handle that for my clients. There are simply too many things that could go wrong if a small agency does not have the necessary expertise. One wrong step and you can lose a six-figure client over a $10 domain. And since there are too many things to keep up with in your core business (web development), your time is better spent learning about your core business, not about the web hosting business.

"There's no money in the hosting without a webapplication part (my 2 cents)" - totally agree, that was my experience too.

So you actually asked about selling services and apps hosted in the cloud? That is a good business, if you make it your core business. For example, we resold Google Apps to clients. Since clients were local and preferred to call our phones for support, we sold them our support services too. So, the client bought Google Apps for Business licenses through us and bought added-value services like support, installation, migration, consulting etc.

That's a good business. Specialization and focus helps here, so that you don't spread yourself too thin.

The way I see this "clients do or do not need support" is this (and this metaphor faired well with clients, to help them understand why support and maintenance is absolutely crucial): I personally don't need medical insurance either because I'm healthy most of the time. But what happens when I get sick? I need fast remedy and I want to live my life assured that there's a team of experts on standby, ready to take me in.

In my experience, it made no sense to argue with the client about maintenance when the website was "sick". All the client wanted was for us to fix it. I knew that, so I made sure I sold them a maintenance package in advance, when they "didn't need" it. A website is just like a bridge: if you build it, you're responsible for it, but it's not for free. Everything I put in the world, I am responsible for, but the client needs to pay for it.

Here's how we sold support: - 30 days guarantee period (after launch) - we were selling only annual contracts. A lot happens every month. Frameworks and libraries need updating, 404 links happen, browsers update, CMS systems get new security updates... There's a ton of things to keep an eye on as a developer, and you could create an annual plan which your client pays for monthly (give her a discount when she signs a contract).

Web agency founder with a decade of experience in selling websites here. I wrote a book on the subject of recurring revenue for web agencies and web professionals, all based on our experience.

Here's what worked for us:

- after selling a website, we sold the mandatory support and maintenance contract. We considered this service the foundation, or level one of our recurring revenue stream. This is fairly easy to sell and renew. The recurring revenue we got from this was enough to keep us afloat.

- after selling support and maintenance, we upsold the client to "levele two": services which grow our client's online business. The types of services we offered in this plan: everything that needs to be done to reach client's business goals, and that we could deliver well. This was harder to sell (because the type of client needs to be just right for this kind of service), but the amount of money coming in every month is substantial. This is what makes the agency grow in long term.

Here's what didn't work for us:

- web hosting. We've been offering this for more than a decade and in the end, all things considered, it is just not worth it. A combination of support + maintenance + growth-oriented services is a much better bang for the buck. We sold most of our servers and hosting accounts to a specialized hosting company and focused on what we did best.

For the exact details about building, pricing and selling support and maintenance services, check out my book: https://www.simpfinity.com/books/recurring-revenue-web-agenc... (the part about growth-oriented services is coming soon, matter of weeks)

I love talking about the subject of recurring revenue, it's a passion of mine. I'll gladly answer any questions you might have.

Edited: typo.

The combination of Github + markdown for writing a (technical) book is exactly what https://leanpub.com/ is all about, check it out. (Or, instead of writing markdown on Github, you can upload your markdown files to Dropbox which is then synced with Leanpub). Leanpub also enables you to publish a book and ask for money while you're writing it.

I've chosen Leanpub as the publishing platform for my first book. They only ask for 10% + 50c royalties and there iz zero lock-in with them.

This is a great lesson from the article: "Prioritize the opportunities that are furthest along, biggest, and most likely to close. If you do that, you’ll manage your pipeline most efficiently." -> the best way to learn how to prioritize is to fill your pipeline with more sales leads than you can handle. Nothing like a 14 hour workday in sales teaches you about how a good lead for your business looks like. You can't give every sales lead an equal chance. It's basic sales triage: don't concentrate on leads who you'll win anyway or who you can never win, focus your most work on leads who need your expertise to make a decision (for you).

Looks good!

I'm looking at the pricing table here: https://microco.sm/compare/ . The plan that is highlighted by default to me has a price in British pounds while all other s have prices in US dollars. Consider changing that.

The question is "why this particular project and why now?" and the article deals with the exact questions one should or should not ask when talking to new clients on the phone and also with what to do with answers you receive.

This is Baekdal's follow up post to a recently popular article "How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry" which you can comment on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7161901

Because you need to be focused on one goal only. This campaign's goal is to reach 15,000 EUR. The target audience for this particular campaign are people who already signed the initiative and who are mostly informed about the Initiative.

The goal has been set at 15,000 EUR and the duration of the campaign at only 14 days. There are still 12 days left in this campaign and the donations keep coming in.

Thank you for this image. It helps us basic income activists explain to people that basic income is about redistribution, and how it works. I don't know if you know this or not, but this image is being shared on Facebook and Twitter like crazy :) There's a European citizens' initiative going on right now, we're collecting one million signatures and we're using your comment and your image (with attribution, of course) to drive a point home.

Actually, basic income does not encourage laziness (that's a common misconception based on our personal opinions which make sense from a certain point of view and from a confirmation bias). I'm currently researching basic income and the criticism that BI increases laziness is the most frequently repeated criticism for which I argue that it's invalid because it is based on personal opinion and not on fact.

Actual data and field experiments on basic income prove that people work more hours, that their income increases, that they visit hospitals on fewer occasions and that they spend money responsibly.

Sources: 1) http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 -> Dauphin Canada, 1974-1978 experiment -> only mothers with newborns and teenagers worked less.

2) http://www.usbig.net/bigblog/2013/08/important-study-finds-t... -> BI receivers worked 17% more hours and their annual income after two and a half years was 50% higher (they invested mental resources into building their own businesses or looking for better paying jobs).

Also, allow me to argue that the system would work even if most people did not actually contribute anything. How many Linux users are there, vs. how many developers contributed source to the Linux project? Only a tiny, tiniest fragment of the world developer population actually got off their butts and did something for Linux, and the rest of the world sat by and "leeched" off their work. And yet, Linux thrives. My argument is that we still don't have real data about how many people in % need to be productive for the society to be sustainable and progressive. I believe we grossly overestimate the % of people who need to be productive.