Have it your way

[Four Cofffee]

Does nobody accept a product off the peg these days?

I developed and licensed a web based product, and now every other call is from a user saying they want it to sort by these feature, or save data by that feature, output their own forms, do all of the work for them, make the tea and wk them off. Culminated in a larger user calling today DEMANDING, complete with threats, that I added features to their needs and specification within 2 weeks. And they don't want to pay.

I rather naively thought that people would check what it did before they committed their business to buying it, especially as some of the the gaps they are now finding are business critical. But they buy it and the realise that it didn't suit all the needs of the temporary administrator (thus saving her almost 10 minutes a day and avoidng her having to learn to use the product competently). And of course they have exactly the opposite requirement of the person who called this morning wanting changes to suit them.

Perhaps I didn't get all of the customer needs built in , perhaps I need to be more customer focused, but FFS spend the time to check what it does before you buy it. It's like buying a Ka and then complaining it can't move wardrobes or compete in F1, only has 2 doors and one steering wheel.

Pathetic bad day rant over.

[Simpo Two]

This is the internet age. Everybody wants everything for free, delivered same day. Unfortunately.

[bigandclever]

fk em

Or, tell them how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take to develop, treble those figures, and get a rentacoder to do it. But only choose the bits you can re-sell/licence to other businesses, none of this bespoke guff.

[/]Sir John Harvey Jones[/]

[plasticpig]

That's an opportunity to be exploited in my book. You get your customers to help fund the further development of your product. Although in theory my company sells a standard software product we have never sold a standard bit of software.

[Thurbs]

plasticpig said:

That's an opportunity to be exploited in my book. You get your customers to help fund the further development of your product. Although in theory my company sells a standard software product we have never sold a standard bit of software.

+1

[skwdenyer]

Thurbs said:

plasticpig said:

That's an opportunity to be exploited in my book. You get your customers to help fund the further development of your product. Although in theory my company sells a standard software product we have never sold a standard bit of software.

+1

For further details, see SAP, ORACLE, etc.

[Simpo Two]

Thurbs said:

plasticpig said:

That's an opportunity to be exploited in my book. You get your customers to help fund the further development of your product. Although in theory my company sells a standard software product we have never sold a standard bit of software.

+1

I thought so too. But in this instance they don't want to pay for the extra work.

[bigandclever]

Simpo Two said:

I thought so too. But in this instance they don't want to pay for the extra work.

In that case, they don't get the extra work done. I suspect I'm looking at this in an utterly unrealistic and unreasonable way

[JustinP1]

Four Cofffee said:

I rather naively thought that people would check what it did before they committed their business to buying it, especially as some of the the gaps they are now finding are business critical. But they buy it and the realise that it didn't suit all the needs of the temporary administrator (thus saving her almost 10 minutes a day and avoidng her having to learn to use the product competently). And of course they have exactly the opposite requirement of the person who called this morning wanting changes to suit them.

Change your business model - make *a lot* more money.

Reduce the price of the 'standard' version to where the take up is much larger.

Then if someone wants bespoke changes put them on a whole new licence where they pay a monthly fee which is relative to their savings made. For example, instead of £100 a month, if their proposed bespoke changes are saving countless hours of workload a week, then maybe £500.

Then you solve problems and create big opportunities:

1) People know from the start that they have taken the 'as is' cheaper option, and won't ask you for free changes because:

2) They have the opportunity to pay for them. They can pay if it really matters to them that much, and:

3) With a bespoke piece of software which fulfils their needs perfectly, they will be stuck with you for a long, long time paying the higher bespoke fee and you will rake it in.

[Four Cofffee]

JustinP1 said:

Four Cofffee said:

I rather naively thought that people would check what it did before they committed their business to buying it, especially as some of the the gaps they are now finding are business critical. But they buy it and the realise that it didn't suit all the needs of the temporary administrator (thus saving her almost 10 minutes a day and avoidng her having to learn to use the product competently). And of course they have exactly the opposite requirement of the person who called this morning wanting changes to suit them.

Change your business model - make *a lot* more money.

Reduce the price of the 'standard' version to where the take up is much larger.

Then if someone wants bespoke changes put them on a whole new licence where they pay a monthly fee which is relative to their savings made. For example, instead of £100 a month, if their proposed bespoke changes are saving countless hours of workload a week, then maybe £500.

Then you solve problems and create big opportunities:

1) People know from the start that they have taken the 'as is' cheaper option, and won't ask you for free changes because:

2) They have the opportunity to pay for them. They can pay if it really matters to them that much, and:

3) With a bespoke piece of software which fulfils their needs perfectly, they will be stuck with you for a long, long time paying the higher bespoke fee and you will rake it in.

Oddly the price isn't the determining factor. The buyer is pretty price tolerant as long as they are happy with the results. The troublesome client signed an agreement that bespoking would cost £XXXX but it is platform changes they keep demanding, not bespoking of the outputs per se.

There has always been a non-platform bespoking service but what people have tended to do is to buy the standard package and then bespoke it only when they have a paying client with that requirement who pays the bill (plus a bit) as it is being sold almost exclusively to consultants. Often they are wanting changes not to the version which they use, but to the platform which everyone uses so I have to be sure that the change is what other customers want, but they can only see themselves and their often bizarre needs..

What I am finding is they want changes, some times minor, to suit one particular client or to suit their admin staff. For example the system has a process of validation to make sure that the information it outputs is valid. In about 15% of cases it was raising an alert that required an administrator to confirm the validity by eye. This apparently was costing them 'hundreds of pounds each time' and they demanded an auto validation. I looked at their usage and they had about 100 activations and out of the 15% requiring manual validation, 12% took less than a minute to validate. Their argumnet, which I can see, is that if it can be manually validated we ought to be able to build that to auto-validate. But they bought the product knowing that there was a 15% manual validation requirement. I have now lowered the threshold for validaton so we get a 99% auto-validation because they created such a stink with the licence holder, the result being increased risk of validating poor outputs for all the customers.

They regard themselves as very business savvy. But not so savvy that they didn't realise that they told me how exposed their business was, knowing there is no competitor product they could switch to in the timescales they need and that their threats to develop their own system would run up against copyright, techie knowledge problems and a 6 month delay even if they worked 24/7. The other thing they have not been too clever about is paying their bills on time and actually delivering the orders. Their power is based on the fact that they are 'on the verge of a sale of 25,000 units and at that volume it has to do X,Y and Z.' To date they have sold about 150.

Bottom line is, if the licence holder and I pull the plug on sales to them because of their antics their business will probably go tits up.