Past few days I had done detailed analysis/study about our web development company "QualityPoint Technologies". I did this study from various perspectives like Employees, projects, technologies, clients, HR, pricing approach, marketing plans, own products,... etc.
First of all, I would like to say my "Thanks" to all our customers. Because of the support from our customers we are able to successfully run QualityPoint Technologies 5th year with lot of progress.
Though we had good progress in terms of gaining customers, developing products, launching our own web portals, I still find lot of opportunity in improving our company further. I feel the progress is very slow though it is growing steadily.
I had come up with two important things that need to be improved lot. One is, significant improvements in Employees hiring/training/firing process. I will write separate detailed blog post about it later once after I start implementing it successfully.
The second important thing is, improvement in pricing policy. I will explain about it in detail in this blog post.
In the past 5 years, we had done more than 180 projects for our customers. Apart from these projects we had done small customization works for many of our Timesheet script buyers and SEO Tools buyers.
I understand that I had to quote very less in the beginning so that we can start getting projects. But now I realize that quoting low price is the major cause for the slow growth rate.
Let me explain about it in detail.
- Low price attracts the people who are not having any proper plans for their projects.
- Because of Low price quoting, I find difficulties in retaining the talented employees.
- Customers are NOT valuing our Team's work/time, as they have to pay only very low price. It ultimately breaks the project success.
- The customers who spend less in project development, are not spending any money for promoting their product. Because of this reason, our hard work and skills are NOT getting enough attention. For example, 5 years back, when I start this company we did a project exactly similar to pinterest. Note that pinterest was NOT there at that time. Cloning pinterest is very simple now. But at that time, we had to do lot of hard work to successfully complete the project. We charged less then hundred dollars for completing the entire project. But the client didn't take steps for promoting it. Pinterest which came after few years get lot of exposure. So, obviously working with low-budget clients didn't give any benefit for us.
So, I had decided to charge our clients at appropriate price instead of blindly charging low price.
Anyway, I respect the value for the money paid by our customers. So, I am NOT going to price very high. And, I will take all the necessary steps to give most valuable work for the each hour of work.
After doing some market study and evaluating our work, I came up with appropriate price of $8 USD per hour of work. Still this price is very less comparing to the many other companies.
I will be charging $8 USD per hour of work starting from July 1st, 2013. Till end of this month our existing customers and people who have already requested for pricing, can pay the current price.
And, we had taken lot of efforts to improve the development strategy and processes so as to improve the speed and quality of development. And, we had come up with lot of script libraries to improve the development speed further.
Apart from doing web development, we do Software testing , SEO/SEM/Social Media promotion/virtual assistance also. The same price is applicable for them also.
I had informed our existing customers about this price change thro' email.
Please note that $8 per hour is applicable for our Team members only. If you want me to work specifically in any complex testing tasks or for any discussion/analysis, I will charge $15 per hour. And, I can spend only 2 or 3 hours per day. Anyway as usual, I will be spending my time without any charge for guiding our team, review their work, help them to understand requirements properly, help them to communicate better, motivate them to work properly, teach them about data security and privacy, remind them to take data backup regularly, and give any technical assistance.
And, recently we had developed few Twitter/Facebook Apps, and newsletter for our own motivational web site TheQuotes.net. If you want similar scripts, We will be able to develop them with minimum efforts, and therefore minimum cost for you.
Personally, I have around 15 years of experience in IT, and past 5 years I am trying out various aspects of online businesses and gathered valuable knowledge about which will work out and which will not work out. I will not hesitate to share this knowledge with my customers, as I strongly believe that we can achieve success ONLY if our customers get success.
So, I am sure that our customers will be giving their support continuously irrespective of this price change.
Anyway, I prefer to focus more on developing/promoting our own products/websites than working on low-paying customers projects. Actually I have tested it in past few months. It is more profitable than working for low-paying customers. In this case, I welcome the investors for investing in our websites.
If you have any questions contact me at rajamanickam.a@gmail.com
And, you can read my previous post to know the benefits of our web development.
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