Episode 201 | Dealing with Crunch-Time Stress, Balancing Life and Work and More Listener Questions

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 201 | Dealing with Crunch-Time Stress, Balancing Life and Work and More Listener Questions

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Show Notes

• My DBA, Creston from Ruby Tree Software
• Thanks to @allanbranch, @earthlingworks and @tosbourn for questions asked via Twitter

Lifehacks (from Michał Domański):

1. Buy food online – saves time and money
2. Don’t buy sugared soda – try finding soda sweetened with xylitol or stevia, if not possible go for 0 calorie options. Saves about 400 – 800 kcal a day depending on your consumption.
3. Try short, high intensity workouts like Tabata method or Prison workout from http://trinitytraining.blogspot.com
4. Kettlebells are a proved way of delivering short workouts and functional strength (focus on technique, go light on weights)
5. Have a daily meal plan, buy food accordingly. If you work from home, have everything ready before you start working, if you work from office have it packed and take it with you. Saves a ton of time and money on lunch + you eat healthier
6. Have a bottle of mineral water near, developers consume a lot of caffeine and that flushes minerals and dehydrates you. Replenish yourself 🙂

Supplements (from Michał Domański):

1. Multivitamin stack, choose one that suits your age and gender
2. Brain supplements – ones that work (proven scientifically): huperzine, vinpocetine, caffeine, bacopa monniera. Try taking them together in the morning and see what happens 🙂
3. Sleep: melatonin – people working with glowing screens are low on melatonin, try supplementing yourself, starting from 5mg and see if you sleep better
4. Brain food: MCT oil (healthy fats), this is very beneficial but start slowly as body has to adjust with increased lipase production

Stuff that works for me, but may not for you (from Michał Domański):

1. Low carb diet
2. Meditation – simple mindfulness for 10minutes daily

Transcript

[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest of Us, Mike and I discuss dealing with crunch time stress, balancing life and work and more listener questions. This is Startups For The Rest of Us, episode 201.

[00:10] Music

[00:18] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest of Us the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products – whether you’ve built your first product or your just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.

[00:27] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. So what’s the word this week sir?

[00:32] Mike: Well I’m getting back on track after taking the weekend off and going on my personal retreat. I spent the weekend in my cottage up in the Adirondacks. The weather was kind of crappy so I came home a day early and spent the rest of my retreat in the basement.

[00:44] Rob: What came out of that? Did you find it enlightening because this is the first one you’ve done. I imagine it takes a little while to get into it, and I’m wondering if anything came out of it.

[00:53]Mike: It didn’t take me very long to get into it at all. I started on Friday night. I started making notes and stuff right away. I separated it out into 3 different things. I had a Google Doc that I was working form, to at least start off with. I had a list of questions to ask myself. Then I had a bunch of tips during the retreat for myself. I was like, okay I need to have something that comes out of this, so beyond my notes I want to have some sort of action list. What I found was, first of all notebooks don’t work for me. My writing skills just do not keep up with what I’m thinking about. So I ditched it and went to the iPad and was just banging out notes left and right and that really helped move things along. The other thing that came out of it was my action list actually spawned off other action lists. I’ve got different action lists for different projects and different goals and things like that.

[01:43]Rob: Nice, so you have a personal side and a business side to it?

[01:46] Mike: I have some action lists for personal stuff and some that are directly related to specific aspects of the business. For example, AuditShark Marketing just had 1 action list unto itself. Then there were other things that were ancillary.

[02:02] Rob: Right, that makes sense. The reason notebooks work me, is that I don’t take word for word notes. I do a lot more thinking than I do writing. So I will spend 30 minutes not writing anything and just in deep, deep thought and try to mull through a topic and maybe sketching or drawing to get the more creative side of my brain going as I’m thinking through this. Maybe do a little bit research here and there, but I come to an epiphany and I’ll jot that down or I’ll come to a conclusion. It’s rare that I am thinking out loud like it’s a journal or something. Because, you’re right, if I was doing that I would want to type because you think faster than you can write these days.

[02:42] Mike: What I found is that I would just write out brief thoughts and then go back and take a look at them, re-read them and that was really where my epiphanies started to come from. I would write down a bunch of my thoughts then go back and re-read them and that’s when I would have those insights that I needed to have.

[02:59] Rob: Very cool. So was it worth it? Are you planning to do another one?

[03:03] Mike: Definitely. I’m going to regularly start to schedule them.

[03:06] Rob: I think annual. Annual is the minimum for me. Every 6 months is more ideal.

[03:11] Mike: I did find one thing though, camping is not the ideal situation for going on a personal retreat. Having to stop and do the dishes, and cook and things like that, it just totally blows apart some of your schedule.

[03:24] Rob: Yeah! How interesting. I’ve never done it. It kills your flow.

[03:27] Mike: Yeah, I didn’t really think about that before I went but in retrospect, certain times of the day I wasn’t productive at all. And, there are other times, early evening, after I’ve eaten dinner, I was very productive.

[03:39] Rob: Right. Right. So, I had a bit of a rocky start to my Labor Day weekend on Friday. I really need to give special thanks to my DBA, his name Creston Jamison and he runs Ruby Tree Software. He basically was doing a restore to test, just to test database backups. And our previous DBA had stopped testing the restores a few months ago. Friday night he emails me and says we have a problem, the restorer is not working – it’s not working as we would expect. He spent that night, an hour or two, he really came up in a clutch for me and got everything working again. But I don’t, how long that can go on and you have an issue and you go to restore it and it’s not there. I highly recommend this guy, it’s Rubytreessoftware.com and his name is Creston. He’s a rails developer, he does performance tuning and he also a postgres DBA. I just wanted to give him a shout out and a thanks for working on a Friday night of a 3-day weekend for us.

[04:36] Mike: Yeah, that’s kind of scary to have stuff like that running in the background and if you didn’t test it, how would you know it’s not working? Your entire business is hinging on that stuff working and if there is ever a problem –

[04:47] Rob: Seriously. These background processes – and you get so many of them – and as your app grows, I find it really hard to just keep tabs on all of them. With tools like New Relic, Monet and there’s other stuff that can look at it, but really getting down to the nuts and bolts at a certain point, you just have to have someone on a recurring basis actually getting in there and doing some things to verify that everything is in fact functioning.

[05:09] Music

[05:12] Rob: We have a bunch of listener questions. We have several have been emailed to us and then we have several from Twitter that I just asked for questions and we have some good ones. Let’s kick us off with the first one it’s about whether to build a fresh solution for an existing market and it’s from Bill Eisenhower and he says, “Hi, I’ve run across a couple of niche markets recently where there are SaaS apps that look fairly crufty by todays standards. It seems like a reasonable assumption to conclude that there’s money in those spaces. My question is, what do you think about entering in those types of markets? You have the advantage of being able to offer a potentially fresher solution but you definitely begin life fighting well established others for market share. Any advice or thoughts?”

[05:54] Mike: I think that the fact that there are other SaaS apps in that area is partly a good sign because it means there are people willing to pay for that. That essentially takes away one of the things you need to worry about when you’re building a new application. The thing you do have to wonder about is where are they currently getting their traffic from and where are they getting their customers from. What are their price points? Do they have sales reps who are talking to people? How far behind are you? Is there a way for you to take whatever the solution is they’re offering and break it apart and only solve a very small piece of the problem that’s big enough that people are actually willing to pay for. Those are the things I would probably keep in mind but you definitely want to test to figure out, what are the types of sales channels that are going to work for you? Because I think that is the bigger piece of the problem that you need to be able to resolve before you start writing code and figure out a lot of that stuff.

[06:42] Rob: I have some doubts that a market is proven just because there’s a SaaS app in the space. I think you want to go one step further and try to figure out how much revenue they have. Try to do some search, whether it’s Compete.com to figure out how much traffic. Do online research, look at CrunchBase, whatever you can to try and figure out how big they are because there are a lot of SaaS apps and a lot of spaces and they may or may not have ever really hit critical mass. If an app is built, it looks crufty, maybe they only got to 5000 in recurring revenue and that’s how big the market is. I think that’s the first thing I would be careful of is assuming that there is a market just because they’re there. The second thing, my initial inclination is if there’s a crufty SaaS app would be to buy it rather than to try and build one. Here’s why, if they are doing well then they already have enough traffic. They have Google authority, they have in-house knowledge, they’ve probably learned a ton about this market and the marketing – there’s a lot of stuff there. So even if you have to wind up re-writing a lot of the app, or doing a lot of improvements to it, like I did with HitTail a few years ago, you’re going to be so far ahead if you were to acquire their traffic and acquire their existing customer base and acquire as much of that knowledge as you can garner rather than trying to build it from scratch. It’s literally a 1 to 2 year jump. Obviously it depends on if you can afford it and if that’s something you want to do. But that would be my initial inclination going into an existing market.

[08:07] Mike: The other thing, is that by starting that discussion about acquiring them you can probably get some more information about them.

[08:12] Rob: Yeah, that’s interesting, but if you are genuinely interested in acquiring them then it’s not like you’re doing it in bad faith. Right? You actually are interested in figuring out if you guys can work out.

[08:23] Mike: Yeah that depends a lot  on whether or not you have the money and how good your estimation skills are in terms of how big they are. If you look at them and you’re not real sure and you make an offer of, I don’t know, say 10 or 15 thousand dollars or something like that and they say, “Yeah we make that in a week”, then they just told you that they make 10 to 15 thousand dollars a week. It may give you an idea of what the market is like.

[08:46] Rob: So thanks for the question Bill, I hope that was helpful. Our next question comes from JJ and he says. “Hi Rob and Mike. I’d love to hear about dealing with crunch time stress. The stress of short, intense required work like an initial roll out, major upgrades and transitions. Some things that come to mind are making lists, decreasing caffeine, dry runs and test environments. By now I’ve listened to every show of your podcasts. Although I’m in a small enterprise environment I find your podcast useful to promote my work within the organization, thanks.”

[09:12] Mike: I think of anything, decreasing your caffeine levels, is probably a bad thing during that crunch time. That’s my first thought. But as you get closer to those types of things you start to realize that there are some things that you are looking at or trying to do that simply not nearly as important, or not as critical to whatever that time deadline is. As you get closer to a rollout, you may decide there’s a lot of work you can just push off. Whether it’s features or certain types of testing or certain designs and things like that. There are always things you can cut and push off to the future. From a work management standpoint you always have that option available to you.

[09:51] The second thing is unless you’ve publically made those deadlines available to everybody and told people, “Hey this is coming out on Saturday”, who is to say that that work effort has to be done by that time. You can push it out if you need to. Not to say that you want to, but if you need to in order to de-stress a little bit then certainly you should use that as an option. Because the last thing you want to do is get into a situation where you work really hard on the initial roll out and you’re doing all these major upgrades and code restructuring and things like that, and you launch it to people and you may mistakenly think, “Oh the hard work is over, I get to go out and do marketing stuff and work with customers”. In reality that is where the work begins. Telling yourself that it’s the other way around, that you’re going to take a break is not the ideal scenario. You want to be able to manage that long term.

[10:38] Rob: Yeah, I agree with Mike. It’s interesting that JJ brought up caffeine, like decreasing caffeine, because if you’re naturally an anxious person then caffeine can increase anxiety but I find it also makes you tend to preform – you’re more focused and you’re able to get things done. I tend to increase my caffeine during these crunch times. Now, if your crunch time is 3 months long then that’s obviously not a good thing. You need to figure out what you’re doing wrong so that your crunch time is not that long. When you have a few days – we pulled an all nighter about a month and a half ago. I went to bed fairly early. One developer stayed up most of the night rolling out  HitTail from ASP and moving into the Rails version during a data base migration and, frankly we had this by the minute account of what it was going to be. I learned to do this from when I was an electrician and we would do shutdowns of data centers. You had to have this shut down check list and you had to have this thing mapped out by the minute to make sure that anything didn’t mess up. You had multiple supervisors essentially approve this and walk through it and offer feedback and all that stuff. It sounds like a bunch of stuff by committee, which I hate. But when you’re doing something that is time critical it is so much better to – literally we had it in a Google Doc. It ran by the letter and we could tell when we were ahead or behind. And we could tell if this thing was going to take until 7 in the morning or if it was going to take until 4 in the morning because we could tell if we were ahead or behind in the schedule. Lists are not necessarily it but it’s kind of having a well documented process for something that is super intense and then having a – we had a testing checklist of everything I wanted to test once we rolled out.  It just gave me the confidence that I wasn’t thinking about this at 3 in the morning or 4 in the morning when your head isn’t clear. I had thought about it 2 weeks prior and had a few read it, we revised it, we worked on it together. I think it was pretty rock solid by the time we were done. It’s the advance preparation that will help you with that major upgrade or transition.

[12:32] Mike: Yeah, as you pointed out the last thing you want to be doing is making major decisions at 3am.

[12:37] Rob: So thanks for that question JJ, I hope that helps. Our next email is actually not a question – it’s a comment with some really good insights. It’s about episode 186, life hacks for entrepreneurs. This email is from Mihao Dumansky. He’s a long time listener. He said he wanted to share some of his own simple life hacks. I won’t be able to share them all but we’ll add them into the show notes for this episode. Here’s several things that he suggested that he’s been using to hack his life essentially. One is to buy food online, it saves time and money. Don’t buy sugared soda, try to find something sweetened with xylitol or stevia, if not possible go for zero calorie options because it saves between 400 and 800 calories a day if you drink a lot of soda.

[13:18] Mike: Real quick to go back to that last one buying food online – saving time and money. It definitely saves time but most people say it will probably cost you more money because you have to have it delivered and everything else.

[13:28] Rob: Another couple he has is to try short, high intensity workouts like Tabata method or prison workout and he gives us a link there. The last one that I like, is to have a bottle of mineral water nearby. Developers consume a lot of caffeine and it flushes minerals and dehydrates you. So, replenishing yourself with water doesn’t replace minerals.

[13:45] Mike: What’s next on the list?

[13:46] Rob: Next, we haven’t done this before, but I went to Twitter this afternoon and just asked if people had any questions for us to discuss on the podcast. And the first question came back from Allen Branch of Less Everything. He said, I’m interested on hearing your thoughts on balancing life and work and what a typical day’s schedule looks like.

[14:04] Mike: For me, balancing life and work has a lot to do with bouncing back and forth between them. So depending on the day of the week and what’s going on that day, I might do a lot more work stuff or I might do a lot more life stuff. Tuesdays, for example, are a complete mess just because of the way the schedule works out. My wife teaches Zumba classes so I’m constantly bouncing back and forth on Tuesdays. Wednesdays are a lot more open, Mondays are a lot more open but Tuesdays are a nightmare in terms of having to bounce back and forth. And being able to make sure you set aside specific times where you are going to stop working. I try not to work on the weekends. I do on occasion but it usually depends on if I had a Monday that gets blown apart because of a holiday and something comes up and I have to get off schedule, then I might have to reserve a Saturday or Sunday.

[14:50] It’s just a matter of re-arranging and knowing what my schedule is and my wife’s schedule. We actually have our calendars shared so I can pull up my calendar and I’ll look at it and I’ll see when she’s busy and see when I’m busy and, see what the overlaps are, and see where one of us is going to have to deal with the kids or attend something we may not have planned on. When my kids are in karate, they’re both in soccer – those things have to be taken into account.

[15:13] Rob: In terms of balancing life and work for me it’s the same way. I was at my son’s school today for 30 minutes helping out because he had an issue going on. So, I walked over from work. I find that the two overlap a lot. A lot more than I thought they would, and frankly a lot more than I hoped they would. I don’t do well with interruptions and I’m interrupted once or twice a day with something – with the school calling or my wife saying, “Hey, I need you to pick this up because this person didn’t show up.” We just have a lot of moving parts with two full time working parents. But with that said, I feel like balancing life and work involves a couple of things. One, when I’m working I try to be really, really focused and work, so I don’t sit around the water cooler and talk to people and waste time, at least I try not to. I put on music, I drink some caffeine and I get very intense about what I’m doing and I just roll with it and just try to be highly productive.

[16:07] Then when I’m done, I try as much as I can to shut that off – to completely walk away from email and walk away from social media and try not to work while I’m with my kids. I’ll do stuff like leave my phone in a certain place in the house and just not check it for several hours which means that I can focus on playing games with my kids and hanging out and practice instruments. So I find that I want to do one thing really well at a time and I almost never try to work when my kids are at home because I find that it means I’m not be doing a good job at work and I may be getting irritated. And it feels to the kids, like you’re paying more attention to something else. The one other thing is I try to take some time for myself everyday. Now that I have a 15 minute drive each way to the office, that’s a perfect time, I listen to podcasts. I also do that when I’m doing the dishes in the evening, when I’m cooking. That’s really my time so when I’m doing that I actually will tell people “can you go into the other room and do something?”

[17:03] Because, me sitting there in my own head with the podcast playing, that is where I am able to have some time to myself. We all need that. You can’t just be at work then be with other people all the time. It’s really hard especially for introverts like a lot of us get exhausted with that. That’s where I feel I’m balancing both work and my family and my own life. Trying to balance those 3 things. In terms of a typical days schedule – I don’t know that there is a typical day. I guess if I’m not traveling – I typically work about 9 to 4 then I do a few hours in the evening if needed.

[17:35] Mike: It’s interesting that you bought up listening to podcasts and stuff while you’re doing the dishes. I listen to podcasts while I’m at the gym working out because it’s a perfect time to do both and I don’t really have to concentrate on lifting weights or anything.

[17:47] Rob: The next question is a follow-up. Rueben Gomez from Bidsketch chimed in. He said, “when do you decide to temporarily change your normal schedule to work more or less – and the trade offs that come with that.” This is a really good question actually. I’ve done this a lot, I’ll ramp up my schedule and I will make a concerted effort. I’m intentional about it, I will talk to my wife and those around me and say, “I’m going to be working nights” and put in a couple of 50 or 60 hours weeks because we are ramping up and we need to deploy something, or it’s just a really big push time for us. And, other times I will back completely off. When we had our second child a few years ago, I worked about 12 to 16 hours a week for 10 months. At other times, I’m going to Thailand for a month here in a couple of weeks and I’m going to back way off obviously because of the travel and I want to be able to do things with the family and hang out.

[18:38] I think another point that people would expect less is at a certain point with development of Drip, so much needed to get done and I couldn’t help with it. I backed my hours off on Drip. No more marketing, no more sales was going to help it because churn was too high and we weren’t at product market fit. I backed my hours off and put them towards other things – basically towards, Microconf, HitTail and I even took some time to myself and took some time off work. Those are the kinds of instances where I will ramp up or ramp down. Reuben had asked about the trade offs. I don’t know that I really had a big negative impact from any of those things.

[19:19] Mike: The thing that comes to mind for me is that you intentionally do that. And I do as well. I think that’s the key to being able to change your schedule to work more or less is that when you do it, it needs to be intentional. If you’re gradually ramping up and you keep going up and up and you don’t necessarily realize it. You can find yourself in a bad situation because you’re not doing it intentionally. Things are probably going wrong at that point especially if you’re ramping up. If you’re ramping down, maybe you’re just getting burnt out. I think that either ramping up or down, it has to be done intentionally. You have to think about what it is that you’re doing and why you’re doing it and what those trade off are. When you do that, consciously making that decision to perform those trade off, then at that point, because you made the decision, it’s not a big deal at that point those trade offs. You kind of mentally made those decisions.

[20:10] Rob: Yeah, I like that. I don’t know if I’d put it in those terms but the intentionality is a big piece of it. When I was salaried employee I remember when other people would make the choice for me, meaning they would force me to work more, really, really got to me. As soon as I was able to control that it doesn’t bother me nearly as much especially when I know that it’s a short season. If I’m going to work more it’s going to be for a few weeks here and there and I need to keep myself accountable to that and not try to work 60 hour weeks for 4 months because it’s just not a sustainable lifestyle. Cool. Our next question is from Toby Osborne also from Twitter. He says, “What do you both do to completely relax away from startups? Things like video games, sports, etcetera?”

[20:53] Mike: For me it’s a combination of 3 different things. One, I’ll play video games. Second thing is I’ll read books and then the third one is watching movies. So those are the 3 things I like to do outside of startups. Even the books that I read, they are all fiction. They have nothing to do with business or anything like that. I basically just put my brain in another world and then the same thing with movies.

[21:16] Rob: Nice, I really enjoy good television. I’ll watch Game of Thrones. I was watching Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Mad Men really solid, episodic, long running television that’s well done. I also listen to a lot of podcasts and I enjoy that. That’s not completely away from startups but I do listen to a lot of stuff on the Twit Network which is a just a tech network and then all the podcasts from Tom Merritt, some of them are about Cord Killing and there’s Daily Tech News and that kind of news. That’s not really about startups. It doesn’t really help me at work but it is entertaining and it allows me to be in my own head for awhile each day. I find it really relaxing.

[21:52] I also play music. I’ve been playing the guitar since I was in college. I haven’t written a song in a while, I was in a couple of bands but I find it very relaxing to sit back and play old tunes that I’m familiar with – whether they’re things that I wrote or music from other people. Then I think lastly, frankly, being with my family. We go to the coast of California quite often. A couple of times a month at least. And that time there allows me to completely relax as long as I don’t fill it with thinking about work. Brainstorming about work. Getting emails about work and all that kind of stuff. I find that I can really unwind there.

[22:25] The one other thing is that I’ve been backing a lot of games on Kick Starter like board games and card games. There’s been a resurgence in my desire to play those. I’ve been playing them with my son now 8, and we’ve been playing them like all the time. They’re either pretty simple role playing games or adventure games with cards and strategy games like Lord of the Rings, RISK and all that kind of stuff. That’s been really fascinating to me lately. We played Chess a lot this weekend too. I remember playing it as a kid then at a certain point then you get quote-unquote too busy to do this kind of stuff. I guess, having a kid, for me, is an excuse to be able to do that. Because I would never carve out time, I would just work more. But, it allows me to be forced into carving out that time to have some fun and relax.

[23:12] Mike: Yeah my kids are always bugging me to play a card game called Boss Monster. It was available at Think Geek for a while but I don’t know if it’s available anywhere else right now. That’s kind of a fun game, they like that.

[23:22] Rob: Very cool. Our last question of the day comes from Craig V.N. and it was from the Bootstrap.fm forums. He says, “Our SaaS pricing is basically done on a user level basis, 2, 8 or unlimited users. I’m considering changing this to 1, 5, 10 and unlimited but for now that is what we have. It is not uncommon for clients who have 3 users to ask for a discount or be able to go on a lower level plan. What is your strategy for dealing with this? Do you just give them the discount out of good will?  One thing that I’m considering is that if I give them the discount – asking for a testimonial in exchange.”

[24:02] Mike: I kind of like the idea of asking them for a testimonial in exchange. The problem I think with that is that they are asking for a discount and they probably haven’t used the product yet. I guess if they are using the free trial then that’s a great time to get a testimonial from them because they are still in the honeymoon phase. But I think it depends on why they are asking for the discount. I would take a look at the pricing itself and say is there a massive difference between the 2 user and the 8 user plan? Yeah, if there’s a big pricing difference and they’re only a 3 person company then it could be a problem. Like if their Bootstraped, if they still don’t have anybody working full time then that could be an issue. I think you really need to understand why it is that they are asking for this discount and try to cater to them a little bit. Another option that you would have is, you can say 2 users, 8 users then unlimited, but if you want to go from 2 users to 3 users then it costs an extra 10 dollars a month something like that. So you can kind of ramp it up a little bit and say your kind of allowing them to do it a la cart but you’re not basically pushing them all the way to that next pricing plan.

[25:05] But I wouldn’t offer that to everybody. I would really just do it as a one off thing when people ask. Because you don’t really want to make your pricing pages too complicated or make people make too many decisions. But the people who are coming to you and asking for that kind of thing are essentially going out of their way. So those are the types of things I would think about just because I don’t know how frequently these requests come in and what the pricing difference is between the different levels and things like that. Those are the types of things I would think about. The other thing I would think about is whether or not you are devaluing the higher tier plan by giving them more users. Maybe you take your users and shift them around a little bit. You said you’ve been thinking about changing 1 to 5 to 10 and unlimited. Maybe you offer your software on a flat term per user plan. Something along those lines might work.

[25:48] There are some SaaS applications that might make it work well and there are some that don’t work as well for. Because tier pricing sounds great on the surface – generally I would say the evidence points to it as being better, but I would say it’s also a case by case on each SaaS product. Just because that’s a general rule that tiered pricing works better doesn’t mean that it applies across the board and that it’s going to work better in every situation.

[26:11] Rob: First thing I’ll say is that I wouldn’t give them a discount for a testimonial in exchange. That feels weird to me and I’ve never done that. Like Mike said that might not want to use the product and it sounds like you’re trying to do a one for one or something. It seems odd. Personally I would seriously consider moving to simpler pricing. If you’re having this much trouble with it, why not charge per user? Flat per user rate and when they get over 10, there’s a slight discount. Over 50 there’s a slight more discount. But your tiers, 2, 8 and unlimited is funky. Is there a very specific reason why it should be broken up there? But unlimited doesn’t make any sense. You’re basically saying someone with 9 users should pay the same as someone with 500 users and that doesn’t make any sense. Someone with 9 users can be a small little agency. Someone with 500 is like an enterprise corporation and they should be paying 30, 40 times more than that little enterprise, because they are getting so much more value out of it.

[27:06] So, I would never offer unlimited users with a SaaS app. Those are my two thoughts. Try to go per user pricing – it makes your page way simpler. Say “Look it’s 9 bucks a month per user or 10 bucks a month per user”. And if people say “can I get a volume discount?” Say “yeah it starts at 50 users” and then you deal with them and most people won’t be there. Frankly people are emailing you and asking for discounts when they only have 3 users – hey if you’re going to stick with this, your original question. I would say no in general. No, that’s not how the pricing works. The pricing is tiered and that’s how the tiers work. There is no discount just because you’re not using all the seats.

[27:41] Mike: I think that wraps us up. If you have a question for us you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690. Or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from Where Out of Control by Mute used under creative comments. You can subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for us by Startups For the Rest of Us or at startupsfortherestofus.com where you can also find full transcripts of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.