rubeng
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
248
Submissions
72
Member since
Nov 24
My product: www.bidsketch.com
My personal blog: www.extendslogic.com
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
Bidsketch | https://bidsketch.com | Portland, OR | REMOTE
Bidsketch is a profitable bootstrapped SaaS (subscription web app) that customers use to create client proposals. I launched Bidsketch working nights and weekends, and eventually grew it to a small team of four. Now we're looking for someone with Rails experience to join the team.
Some of the benefits:
- Work remotely
- Flexible schedule
- No layers of management and no investors or shrinking runway to worry about
- Fun and friendly team that gets stuff done
We currently have a great team of four :) I'm the founder -- I mostly do marketing and some lightweight coding. Nicole does customer success (which means she helps customers). Eric and Paul do a lot of the heavy lifting and spend most their time writing code. Our team page can be found here: https://www.bidsketch.com/about
You can see more details and apply here: https://weworkremotely.com/jobs/2232-rails-developer
Comment · 13 years ago
It's still early but haven't had any issues so far.
Comment · 13 years ago
Totally agree with Alex. This is something that I (and most other SaaS owners I know) look at regularly. And it's not always easy.
Comment · 13 years ago
Glad you liked it! You're right; I could've used a lot of these strategies when I was hiring inside of a big co.
Comment · 13 years ago
Not a prob! :) These were single people with a limited budget. I do have a Bidsketch customer that almost falls into this category (and I helped find a dev), but I didn't include him since he runs a small SEO shop where he's used to outsourcing and had tens of thousands to help him fund the development. Dane Maxwell, which Nathan mentions and doesn't have dev experience, also took the outsourcing approach in building his $40k+/month web app. Though he had a few years experience trying to bootstrap other apps before he was successful to that level.
Comment · 13 years ago
You know, after I helped them out with picking a developer, they didn't ask for help once development started. I offered to help but they either didn't run into problems or didn't come to me when they did.
These are the ones that were successful at it...many more were not. But I don't know if the ratio is the same for people with/without dev experience (plus sample size is too small).
What I do know is that most:
1. Got help picking a developer initially
2. Had some guidelines on how to work with a developer
3. Had no development experience
4. Had to get learn how to outsource and made some mistakes (but eventually made it work)
Outsourcing is tough at first but it gets easier. Like any skill, you have to get better at it.
In any case, I do think it's a great idea to learn how to program so you're not so helpless if/when problems come up.
Comment · 13 years ago
I'm a big fan of outsourcing development as that was the route I chose to launch my product (http://www.bidsketch.com) in a much shorter time than it took when I was doing everything myself.
I outsourced the early code and design. Quality of both was shaky, but I only had $3,000 to put into it so I wasn't working with much. I later picked up on the last 25% of the development to get into a beta (since my cash ran out), but I was very glad I took this approach.
I've since been able to work with higher quality of developers and designers and improved both areas, but when you have a product that's solving a real problem, customers will be more than happy to pay for that shaky 1st version (as they did with mine).
That said, I have a dev background and learning Rails before outsourcing it was a big help. I know people that don't have a dev background and successfully outsourced dev of their products (I even helped a couple pick their developers), but it's a bit tougher and it helps if you have at least someone with a dev background that can help you pick the right developer.
Comment · 14 years ago
Love that talk, thanks. I do have some ideas for tests I want to run in the future when I get back into optimization mode.
Comment · 14 years ago
I tested increasing prices without touching anything else and it resulted in significant revenue increase but I hit a local maximum as the segmenting was off and value communication needed to be improved. The right branding with the wrong pricing can actually hurt so it's extremely important to get both pricing and value messaging (including the qualitative stuff) right.
Comment · 14 years ago
Sorry about that. What happened when you submitted the form? Did you receive a confirmation message saying that you'll receive an email? If so, you might want to check your spam folder in case it made its way there for some reason.
Two reasons for the email: 1. Marketing purposes. So I can send additional educational (and hopefully useful) content. 2. I actually take the name and email address then dynamically create a PDF proposal using that information on the cover page.
The execution is a bit sloppy as it was an experiment and quickly put together so I'll need to work on improving that now that I'll be keeping it.
Comment · 14 years ago
I had more people signing up for the higher tier plans when I a/b tested the plan names. Don't remember what the numbers were exactly but it was interesting to see behavior change because of the plan names.