tobinharris

AppFlows is a privacy-first online tool that helps you scope, estimate and visualise app ideas as fast as you can type.

I made AppFlows to help our clients here at Pocketworks. Most app ideas start with boring spreadsheets, and I craved a visual way to scope, estimate and explore ideas without getting bogged down in visual design.

It's a bit rough n' ready, but any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I run a mobile app agency like you and we do pretty well selling GaSaaS.

I'm a developer but have studied sales quite a lot over the last 10 years. The most important thing I learned is to find clients that fit you really well when it comes to skills, culture and budget.

To do this you have to give a shit and not be afraid to ask potentially off-putting questions. Stuff like:

"Are you sure you want to build this app, your business case doesn't add up so why bother?"

"Can you demonstrate you're in this for the long haul? There's no joy in building an app that fails, which is what happens if you don't budget to iterate your app."

"How come you don't hire freelancers or contractors, it will cost you less?"

Obviously I ask nicer questions too, but these are good "give a shit enough to risk losing the sale" kind of questions.

Interestingly, I've found that tools become less important the more you nail your purpose, culture, communications and processes.

For that, the Traction book would get you off to a very good start in implementing your company "Operating System".

I do understand your interest in tools though, but I spent far too long obsessing over tools in my business. Perhaps it's because I'm a software developer and I wanted to believe that tools could fix the problems, rather than facing up to the more human challenges.

Right now our 15-person business uses Notion, Slack, Google Docs, Figma Jam, Semrush and Productive. These cover all the things you mentioned.

You're right about the downturn, it's impossible to run a team for long without a full order book. That said, I think you'd have this problem for an offshore team too, perhaps with a much longer "sat on hands" cash runway.

I have a friend who's set up an offshore team and he saves 70% on developer salaries from what I can infer.

We employ within Europe and the UK, our average dev salary is around $65,000.

Not at all, we just finished our financial year and it was 14% operating profit.

The previous year was 29%, but last year was lower as I made some expensive decisions during the COVID period. Basically, I grabbed all the revenue opportunities I could without too much concern for profit

I run a small-ish dev shop ($1.5m revenue) and there are a lot of things I wish I knew back in 2012 when I started.

1. Finding clients is hard. Think hard about what an awesome customer looks like and then figure out how to reach them. This is the most important thing IMO. I'm reading Standout of Die, it has good advice on this.

2. First attempt, I started with about $40,000 and blew it all quickly as I didn't have enough sales. Better to get the sales first then grow the rest. You can be transparent about this with potential clients.

3. If your costs are $400,000 a year, and you'll sell 44 weeks of the year allowing for holidays, sickness and wiggle room, then you need to sell $9,000 a week to stay in business. If you want to make 25% profit then you'll need to sell closer to $500,000 a year and $11.3k a week.

4. I'm in the UK, we pay someone to politely chase clients for payment. This was a game changer. Most agreed to pay monthly but never do without a good bit of nudging.

5. As for tips... There are so many good books and courses on building and running a service business, I wish they'd been there when I started. To name a few.

- Jonathan Stark.com - Hourly Billing is Nuts

- Gareth Healey - Standout or Die

- Jason Swenk - Agency Playbook

- Blair Enns - The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

- Blair Enns - Pricing Creativity

- Traction - Gino Wickman

Running a dev shop can be incredibly rewarding and fun, especially if you love the work you're doing. Building a business will be like learning a whole new career, so don't underestimate the learning curve the number of mistakes you can make (if you're like me haha). It's great that you're asking for advice, it will save you some headaches :)

We do this. We're only a small 12-person software agency, we have two Elixir developers right now.

When we hired the 2nd, we looked for someone who had good knowledge of Node, Rails, Laravel or whatever and were excited to learn Elixir/Phoenix. Then they completed a Udemy course and started practicing. It worked out pretty great!