Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Resolutions First Application

We're probably about 3-4 weeks away now from our initial project release, and we're working on some of the "details". Like a name. A hosting service. Pricing. We'll work backwards.

Pricing.

Most of our competitors are non-web based, following the "old" software model. They charge somewhere between $299 and $15,000 for a software product, and the customer just "hopes" that it will work out for them. Our few web competitors charge between $20 and $50 per month for access. Which means that they get online access, and over a year, they could have purchased two or three of the stand-alone products. This doesn't make sense.

My knee-jerk reaction is to offer a few pricing levels. Specifically:

1. Free. As in Beer. We're having a toss-up as to whether to limit this to certain functionality, or to make it wide open. We're also having a hard time deciding whether or not to put ads on the free site. Probably NOT Google ads (since it would only show competitors).
2. Low monthly ala-carte. Pay for what you want. You want feature XYZ ... great! Base price of some low $$$ figure (say, $2), and then add on the features you would like.
3. Fixed price with support. Users, some of them, really like the old-software model. Pay $199 for QuickBooks, and other than upgrades, you are set for life. Why can't we offer web software this way? Some moderate $$$ figure (say, $299), and then an annual support and upgrade cost (say, 15%).
   

Although I like the above strategies long-term, our first release is going to be minimal functionality. Just the basics. And we like it that way. So, how do we move someone from Excel to our service? We're not sure yet, but we do like the idea of FREE all the way. For now.

Hosting Service.

Over the years, I've worked with companies (and had companies) with in-house hosting, outsourced, offshored, clustered, and ... well, every possibility. And, while they all have their merits, there's not reason to pay for a T1 to be brought into our offices, and have to manage our server.

A quick call to OLM.net (one of my preferred hosting providers) got us an eServer1, with the hardware upgrades we want, for under $100 / month. And with a mostly text-based application, I don't think we'll reach the 250GB / month bandwidth restriction for a while.

Name.

The stickiest part of our current set of problems is a catchy name. A name that makes sense to our brick and mortar customer. And yet, one that we don't lose in the sea of competitors.

Let's just say that our application is a .... Donut point of sale system. It's not, but, for pretend, let's make one. All of our competitors are "Donut POS", or "POS Donut", or "Donut Pro", or "Fast Donut POS", or "Optimal Donut", or "The Donut POS", or "POS Donut Pro", or .... you get the idea.

We'd like to stand out .... and that's proving difficult.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 9:23 PM