A Fully Baked Offer
Recently, I came to understand one thing that I think the rest of the startup business community automatically knows (at least I feel pretty embarrassed about it). However, many startups have no founders with business experience (I and my business partner have tech backgrounds), so I thought it would be worth describing a concept that I have overlooked for years. Our business has struggled because of it.
The Components Of An Offer
A fully baked offer consists of three things.
- A specific customer
- A specific deliverable
- A specific price
Our Original Offer
Since day 1 we were selling programming services at either hourly rates or a fixed price that changes with each custom job. We have a lot of experience with different programming languages and platforms, so we’d sell our services to anyone who wanted quality programming done. It seemed reasonable to expect that our satisfied clients and example work would generate more business for us as we went.
As it turned out, our offer was garbage. It was not only difficult to sell, but it did nothing to build our business in the long run. Our example work was all over the board, which gave us a lot of eclectic experience, but no one group of potential customers could identify with it.
So I realize now that our initial offer actually looked like this:
customer: anyone looking for software
deliverable: anything they want us to build
price: what ever we estimate the job to cost
No wonder we got beat on price by freelancers and on experience by larger companies!
What We Do Now
Over the last couple years (year 7 & 8, mind you), we’ve discovered a couple things:
- Our target customer is an entrepreneur without a technical co-founder (by circumstance or by choice) looking to build a mobile or web app, and who identify with lean business development models. We discovered that these are the people who care about the product as much as we do, and are willing to make the investment (time as well as money) to develop a good product.
- Our specific deliverable is now: Our Starter Package (idea blueprint, concept apps, UX/graphics, and launch). It’s the same for every new web or mobile app, which is terribly important.
- The deliverable has a set price regardless of industry or perceived complexity, with just a few exceptions (that we have not run into yet).
Eureka! Now we have something that can be sold. We’ve burned up years trying to sell a half-baked offer, and I hope this article helps just a few companies out there to save a little time.
Have fun and { create : awesome }
I own a small company called BOUNDLESS. We help entrepreneurs build apps and launch their startups — http://getboundless.com
