20 March, 2013

Scholarship for Lean Product Development Course

Happy to announce that GitHub is sponsoring a scholarship for one student to participate in Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course. This scholarship will be available to any student who meets the following eligibility criteria:

Genuine financial need
Bootstrapping business
Product idea is in a prototype stage
Demonstrates a strong desire to attend the course

To apply for the scholarship here are the following steps:

Fill out the general course application.
Please mark that you are interested in applying for the scholarship in the general course application.
Once we receive the general course application, you wil then be sent a scholarship application.
Both the course application and scholarship application must be completed by Sunday March 31, 2013. We will announce the scholarship winner on Friday April 5, 2013.

Depending on the number of applicants, there maybe an additional 30 minute interview conducted with applicants on Monday April 1, 2013.

Remember this is the last time Poornima will be teaching the Lean Product Development course in 2013. So if you’re committed to advancing your product idea, and interested in utilizing a scholarship to make it happen, then don’t delay, apply today!

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18 March, 2013

One Last Chance in 2013 to Attend Poornima’s Lean Product Development Course

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15 March, 2013

Lean In for Femgineers

by Frances Advincula

Yes, I am writing a post inspired by Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In. I mean, how could I not? The gender disparity is quite possibly the most obvious in the tech industry. Just last week, a software engineer friend brought up that they had no women engineers in their startup! A cause close to my heart, I could go on and on about how these companies are doing themselves a great disservice (“We Need More Women In Tech, Here’s Why”), but instead, I thought I better stick to what I know best — the musings of a 21 year-old fresh grad software engineer.

In her TED talk “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” which her new book expands on, Sandberg lists three main tips:

1. Sit at the table.

2. Make your partner a real partner.

3. Don’t leave before you leave.

So, I thought why not take those and apply them to the context of a femgineer’s every day life? Let’s start, shall we?

Sit at the table.
For me, battling the impostor syndrome is a regular occurrence, and as a young woman in tech, I see a lot of examples of women undervaluing themselves. I know this because I do it all the time, and I should know better. I apologize for broken builds that are not my fault, I assume a build is broken because of me, I don’t challenge opinions in meetings enough. In fact, when someone told me I was the talk of the town, I was shocked. I didn’t even remotely see myself as that, and I still don’t know what they are talking about. Most girl programmers I know feel bad when they can’t solve the problem; they must not be smart enough. But guys? Nah. It’s the code’s fault, or the framework’s fault, or someone else’s fault.

Femgineers of the world, why do we do this to ourselves?! Instead, I challenge us to be aware of the impostor syndrome and recognize it for what it is. And then let’s go on about our day, getting stuff done, thinking about what kind of software engineers we want to be, and proactively making positive choices that build-up our careers.

Choices like…

Finding a mentor. Some people differentiate between a mentor and a sponsor, but I will just define it here as someone who can guide you to be where you want to be. Someone who is doing what you want to be doing and can give you guidance and advice to get you there. It’s better by a magnitude if you can find a mentor within your company. I was lucky enough to find one within Accenture, and he has fought for me tooth and nail. Fought for me to be in a big, high profile project. Fought for me to be able to move to the location that I wanted. Fought for me to be in the front lines of UI development. In fact, he was about to hop on a plane with a few other execs, and he asked me if I had anything to say to them. Me. At the bottom of the totem pole suddenly has access to execs? So you get the point. Sheryl Sandberg had Larry Summers. I suggest we find ours.

Finding a peer confidante. Having a mentor is great, and having a peer to trudge the waters with makes for a killer combination. One of my greatest friends also works at Accenture, and she and I have lunch once a week just to talk about what we are going through. Because we are close in age, she understands what I am going through and vice versa. We also feel more comfortable telling each other dreams, failures, insecurities, and worries we might not want to share with our mentors just quite yet. In fact, take the idea to a new level by hopping on over to LeanIn.org to read about the concept of a Lean In Circle.

Developing your voice/confidence. It will be hard at first, especially if you are naturally an introvert like I am. But as one of my favorite TED talk says, “Fake it until you become it.” Start with baby steps, like being more visible. Start replying to group emails and be active with in-house social media. Participate in events that are going on. I volunteered to help with our Software Craftsmanship group and will be helping organize one of our Code Retreats. Now a lot of people outside of our office know who I am. Also remember that the senior guys you are scared of? They love people who are passionate about the work, and passionate people are always curious. Ask questions. Stay updated on the latest technologies so that you can have an opinion. Find something you love, and commit to being an expert in it. Marissa Mayer once said that it’s easy to catch up in tech because things are always changing, or something to that effect (I can’t find the quote now. Darn.) I’m a newbie, but I am now giving training and teaching new developers how to unit test and code with a new framework we are using. Most importantly, always be are aware of your body language and how people are perceiving you. A lot of research say simple things such as sitting up straight and taking up as much space as possible (arms spread apart, resting on a chair versus hands clasped together, on your lap) tricks the brain into being more confident.

Paying it forward. Introduce a girl to engineering. Mentor an intern. Give advice to a fellow woman-in-tech. (Two of the younger kids I sort-of mentor told me they are now choosing to pursue computer science because I have inspired them. They said at first they were scared it would be “too hard”, but were encouraged by the thought that if I could do it, so could they!) Write for blogs that support women-in-tech. Doing “seemingly little things” matter. I sent Nilofer Merchant’s HBR article “Three Reasons Why Men Should Read Lean In” to one of my mangers, because I knew she would send it to the right people. She sent it to a lot of the (male-dominated) leadership and to her brother who heads an IT company and got a lot of positive feedback. Cliché as it may sound, change truly does start with ourselves.

Make your partner a real partner.
Sheryl Sandberg is fighting for a society where women and men equally share household responsibilities, a world where men staying at home raising a family is not considered the exception. That’s great! But what if we aren’t married or have a household or settling down yet? Since it won’t directly apply to us single ladies, I want to take it on a spin.

Date someone who will inspire you and make you want to do better. Date guys who don’t mind that you have to cancel because you have homework overload or had to do overtime at the office. Date guys who help you study for the GMAT. Date guys that push you out of your comfort zone, guys that challenge your decisions, guys that nudge you to take risks. Date guys that are not threatened by, but rather are attracted to, your ambition, passion, and drive.

Again, let’s go as far as saying not letting romantic drama prevalent in a young woman’s life to get in the way of a career. One of my favorite writers Jen Dziura has written articles about this. They’re hilarious, they’re genius, and they’re true.

My favorite, from “Bullish Life: Keep Your Love Life From Ruining Your Actual Life”:

”By which I mean that the probability that any particular guy will be around for forty years is extremely low. The probability that you will have to go to work for the next forty years is extremely high. So, it would be illogical to allow your romantic life to compromise your career and goals until those probabilities change in a way demonstrable other than by your intuition…”

She’s good, huh? Here’s another one: “Picking a Boyfriend Who Doesn’t Hold Back Your Career or Bank Account.”

Don’t leave before you leave.
Do everything you want to do now while you don’t have that many responsibilities. Work 120 hours for that startup or put in the overtime for the high-visibility project, now, while you don’t have kids, because you can. People scold me that I don’t know what work-life balance means, but I argue that I see work-life balance over a long period of time. I am working like a horse now so I can have a stable, flexible career when I have kids. In fact, I am doing lots of hard things now because of my “future kids.” Like pursuing a masters with a fulltime job. Because I know that it will be exponentially harder to do that when I’m trying to raise a family. I know that sounds odd coming from a 21-year old, but you know what smart women do? They plan way ahead.

Don’t just not leave. Aim high, stay passionate, give back, and dive in!

Frances Advincula writes the series Frances Fridays. Frances recently graduated with a degree in Computer Science and is currently pursuing a masters at Johns Hopkins. She now works as a Software Developer for Accenture Software. A proud geek girl, she’s sure she is the only one who can’t play video games. Tweet her at @FranAdvincula.

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12 March, 2013

How to Transition to a Remote Team

By Alex Notov

I am no stranger to making decisions about whether to work remotely or at the office. I have been a software engineer consultant for more than half of my career. I have always looked for the following in my gigs: less meetings, more focus on productive and creative activity, and flexibility to meet the needs of more than one client at a time. Over time, it became obvious to me, that the clients that did not require me to come into the office, valued the same, and surprising giving me the freedom to work on my own resulted in them getting the best work out of me. I began to see a correlation.

The decision on how much freedom to give employees, and how to structure a team is something a lot of startup and even big companies deal with today. Everyone wants to make progress, and build a close knit culture, but not everyone knows if it’s possible and the steps to put in place to make it happen.

At the start of BizeeBee, Poornima was bootstrapping the business. So we began by working out of out of Poornima’s apartment. Poornima was soon able to get the team into a very nice shared office space in downtown Palo Alto (this is when I joined). Though the office space was boss-status – right on University Ave., it was a 2 hour commute for me each way, from Berkeley. I told Poornima that it made much more sense for me to spend more productive time at home, while reclaiming some of my commuting life back in favor of personal life. It was a win-win. I mentioned that some people tend to be happier when they can do more with their lives, while still loving the work they do. I counted myself among these (ahem, I actually think that’s most people, whom are honest with themselves).

She agreed to my proposal. All of us eventually began to do the same – the office became a place where we all met about twice a week. Poornima then suggested that we move to Palo Alto into our own office space, we all decided to give it a shot. Her main concern was keeping the flow of communication in a young company, not actually office space. Good communication is an exceedingly important part of a successful and functional team, but it’s not made better just by having office space.

I can’t give you a recipe for success, because every company and every team has a different culture and needs. What I can tell you is what has worked for our team at BizeeBee and what is working for us now at Femgineer.

We spent a number of months in our own office space in Palo Alto. A few days there and a few days remote. We used this as an opportunity to fix our communication problems by establishing some very solid processes.

Here’s how we made it happen:

The key element to a successful team is a sense of shared and common vision. Notice that I didn’t say “the key element to a successful remote team.” That is because the subject of remote shouldn’t even be at the core of the discussion. The core of the discussion should be around how to bond intelligent self-sufficient and motivated individuals to work together to achieve a common goal – and, how to remove the barriers to the achievement of that goal, as well as to facilitate it.

Poornima has been awesome at building this sense of shared vision and making it clear to the team. It is fundamentally what has allowed us to get through all the communication issues, and focus on improvements over time.

Now that we’ve got the key element out of the way, let’s talk about more practical take-aways.

At BizeeBee, it took us a while to realize that we can all do very effective work without having to pay thousands of dollars on office space and getting there. When we did, we were all happier for it. Did I mention that it’s a pretty nice advantage that you don’t have to pay rent? Duh. This isn’t why you should encourage remote work, but it sure is a nice benefit. At a certain scale, you probably won’t get away without having an office, but until you get to that scale, get rid of as much unnecessary expenses as possible.

So what are some of the logistics, you might be asking?

The second core element is communication. This is what was missing, even when we had office space.

At BizeeBee we agreed that we needed to communicate on a daily basis. There are tools for that. Use Campfire for asynchronous communication among team members. Or, dare I say email? We got very good at talking about features, deliverables, and plans in quick 1-1 meetings, weekly team discussions, and having postmortems after each release. All of these techniques – which took place entirely online – helped us improve our communication and ultimately almost completely helped us eliminate the underlying problems.

The third core element is keeping track of progress and encouraging individual accountability.

We agreed that we needed to keep track of progress on work. How about using something sprint.ly, pivotal tracker, github issues, asana, etc? Pick one. The world of internet project management tools is your oyster. We used pivotal tracker for keeping track of features and releases, github for keeping track of commits, and campfire for daily scrum status updates. All of these methods helped us keep track of our work, and communicate better.

People execute faster when they have the flexibility to choose how they execute.

Attract the best talent starts with giving your candidates the flexibility to balance their lives with their work – and acknowledging that they are not automatons, but human beings, for whom work is one of the essential parts of their daily lives, but that there are others.

David Heinemeier Hansson had recently written an excellent article about creating an environment for exceptional people to do a-grade work that matters to them, and to the overall direction of the company. I could not agree more:

A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.

But there are still traces of some old school thinking: there has been a lot of talk in the press recently about CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to force all Yahoo! remote employees to come into the office. Though I am a bit late to the game, I thought I’d weigh in and say that I find Mayer’s and Yahoo!’s decision absolutely silly. It’s no wonder to me that Matt Mullenweg of WordPress commented regarding Mayer’s leaked internal memo:

For anyone who enjoys working from wherever they like in the world, and is interested in WordPress, Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco.

At WordPress, like at many other forward-thinking development shops, the founders and team leaders are realizing that their employees’ lives are just as valuable if not more so than their jobs. Sir Richard Branson recently chided Mayer and Bloomberg - New York’s mayor holds similar views to Mayer – about the foolish policies:

However, on this occasion I disagree completely. Many employees who work from home are extremely diligent, get their job done, and get to spend more time with their families. They waste less time commuting and get a better work/life balance. To force everybody to work in offices is old school thinking.

Don’t run a shitty company. Your employees will quit. And I really hope Yahoo has a mass exodus.

So, in closing, and to recap, to transition to a remote team, start with a sense of shared vision, give motivated individuals the responsibility to execute on parts of that vision by allowing them to take ownership, provide the tools and processes to make that happen, and then adapt to how your team evolves over time in the execution phase.

Oh, and, just one more thing: don’t forget to fire the true slackers. True slackers slack, regardless of whether they are in a cubicle watching youtube videos all day long, or in their pajamas watching a marathon session of the Walking Dead. There’s also nothing wrong with a bit of any of those things in between work. People – your employees are people not automatons – have lives and vastly varied interests outside of work. Encourage them to do what makes them happy and get out of their way.

At BizeeBee we realized it was time to stop paying unnecessary rent. We moved out, and all began to work from home. One of our guys even moved to a different part of the country, and we were still able to ship product consistently!

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12 March, 2013

Building a Bootstrapped Business

I’ve always been fascinated by businesses that grow slowly, and hit their stride around year 4 or 5 or 10! What make them interesting is their ability to do so without much outside capital (less than $500k).

Unfortunately, too much of what we see in the mainstream, and what is praised are the home runs hit by startups that are well-funded in their infancy. But then we see that they are the ones that are prone to early acquisitions. What leads to their early acquisitions is an inability to balance cost and revenue. People don’t keep tabs on their sources of costs: servicing customers, overhead – employees, and production. Instead, the founders strongly fixate on growth, but it’s actually growth that fuels rising costs. No matter what business you’re in margins are what matter.

Then there are those that aren’t acquired and manage to IPO. Once again the IPO isn’t fueled by a strong revenues, but growth. Resulting in common cases where the stock falls precipitously after the IPO, I think we know of a few out there today that have experienced this…

Hence, as founders we have to ask ourselves the question, should we really be striving for hyper growth? It seems unsustainable because it creates a set of expectations that are untenable long term.

So how do you get past the hype and instead focus first on building a sustainable business that will eventually be big?

1. Focus on value creation.

This of course means that you have to really understand what your customers need, what they are willing to pay for, and how both of those variables change as you move from an early adopter to a mainstream customer.

You can offer a simple value proposition to early adopters and still monetize off of them. However, you might receive push back after sometime, because they’ll want you to provide deep value that keeps them engaged.

There are startups that don’t raise a lot of capital, and manage to get to break even early on from their early adopter pool. The secret to their success is putting emphasis on the following formula:

simple product value proposition (keeps cost of servicing down)

+ attractive pricing (based on perceived value to early adopters)

+ volume (matching up the pricing to the # of customers needed to hit break-even) + identifying key distribution channels (cost effective but lead to quick word-of-mouth)

= repeat business and sustainable revenue growth (keeping customers engaged monthly)

There aren’t too many businesses that I’ve seen do this exceptionally well, but here are a few that come to mind: MailChimp, Olark, FreshBooks. Because these are all SaaS products they did have to go through a ramp up period, where they were building product for awhile. The founders worked hard to keep costs low during that ramp up period, but they also had to think about how they were going to attract customers quickly to make ends meet.

2. Steady and sustainable growth.

It’s perfectly normal to grow and then hit a plateau. But once you hit a plateau you have to figure out why you are there. You have to ask yourself the following questions:

“Have I created a solid repeatable model?” (Seeing steady monthly revenues.)
“Is it possible to scale to the next level, if I employ a new strategy, or are there limiting factors about the business that make it hard to get to the next level?” (Limited supply, increased costs of goods, or a limited distribution channel.)
“Are there competitors who have entered that are taking away market share?”
“Is market demand growing or shrinking?”

3. Knowing when and how to get to the next level.

The most important question that I think founders fail to ask themselves is: “Do I even want to grow this business or am I happy where it is today?”

Realize that growing a business from where it is currently at may require new strategies, and those strategies require some level of introspection. You have to analyze what has worked, and what hasn’t. Then figure out if what has worked can continue to work, or if you have to take some time to discover new methods. Most importantly:

Will those new methods pay off?
How long will they take to pay off?
What’s the work and resources required to make it all happen?

Going after mainstream customers required 2 strategies.

You’ll first need to figure out how to sell a product to a mass market, which means figuring out new marketing tactics that expose a common problem or experience across customer types. The second is offering the new customer types a product at a reasonable price, that satisfies demand, production, and service costs. e.g. the price reduction of the initial iPhone, which led to wider adoption.

When you build a business over time it gives you time to think about these strategies. But too often we get caught up in a desire for hyper growth, which may or may not arrive. The desire for it is detrimental to our first goal of creating a sustainable business first by offering a product that customers demand.

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8 March, 2013

Femgineer Forum: Because Knowing How to Code Isn’t Always Enough

By Sujata Menon

If you have ever been in a bind to figure out how to ASK – for a raise, change in role, work life balance, or anything that affects your work life, Poornima Vijayashanker has some simple, well thought out strategies and solutions. Her forums are in the format of a workshop; it is not just all talk. You get to practice what you just heard and receive instant feedback from a group that gets it. This is what makes Poornima’s forums unique!

Poornima’s upcoming Forum at CoverHound in San Francisco, is about Fostering Female Friendly Companies. Here’s the agenda:

Strategies on how to build up the confidence you to need to approach supervisors regarding sensitive topics
Provide you with effective communication techniques for dealing with difficult teammates and supervisors
Give you a guide to building a culture that attracts and retains females, and is known for being female friendly organization

I have attended both of Poornima’s past forums and left with some great usable tips. Poornima’s first forum on Compelling Communication aka how to craft an ASK helped me out a ton! I took a break after I had my first child. 6 months into the motherhood, I started interviewing. I wasn’t sure if I could tell my interviewer that I had a child, and if I should cover up an important aspect of my life. I didn’t know that I could seek out specific jobs based on how supportive the workplace would be, and accepting of the fact that I am a new mother. I constantly wondered the following: Are startups ruled out for me? Or am I destined for a boring job? I had so many questions and I was not even sure if these were valid questions. After meeting the femgineers, I got a lot of feedback and ideas to approach my job hunt which proved very helpful.

The second forum covered yet another important topic of how to change roles at workplace. Poornima had ideas as how one can build up an experience even without the title, look for a job internally or externally with experience and portfolio to prove that you have the experience for the new role.

A typical forum is structured like this:

Poornima will discuss her strategies about the topic at hand like how to craft an ASK.
The participants pair up and discuss, practice the solution to their problem based on Poornima’s ideas.
A few of the chosen participants will get to present to the entire audience for feedback and more ideas to solve the issue.

You will leave the workshop with many tips and ideas to apply at your workplace. Plus, you get to network with fellow femgineers! And, dinner is covered. What’s not to like?

To sum up, here are 6 reasons why you should attend femgineer forums:

Network with fellow femgineers.
Get help from other professionals with similar workplace challenges.
Hear tested solutions about the chosen topic.
Get feedback about your specific issue from a supportive audience which gets it.
Propose new forum topics that Poornima will think about and help you solve.
Enjoy free food.

Even though this event is primarily focused on women in STEM, men are welcome to join. In fact, we had an amazing event at iSocket, where many of the men on the team participated, because they too wanted to know how to change roles in their career!

Hope to see you at the next Femgineer Forum!

Sujata Menon holds a Masters in Computer Science from National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India and works as a developer in SF Bay Area.

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7 March, 2013

Femgineer Spotlight: Stephanie Shupe From Civil to Software

Stephanie Shupe has had quite a whirlwind of an engineering career! At the ripe age of 10, Stephanie helped her dad, who worked in construction, on site. This inspired her to pursue a degree in civil engineering at Virginia Tech. After graduation she continued to work as a civil engineer, but felt like she was spending too much of her time as a project manager, going back and forth coordinating projects. What she really wanted was a creative role where she could solve problems, and basically be an engineer! Stephanie also thought about going to get an MBA, and while she was accepted to business school, she ultimately gave her spot up to pursue software engineering.

She started slowly: civil engineer by day, and learning how to code on CodeAcademy at night. Then to make her dream come true, she decided to take a pretty big risk last year, by going full steam ahead, and moving to San Francisco to study at App Academy.

Post graduation she joined Lookout, and wouldn’t you know the first week on the job her company hosted their semi-annual hackathon, and guess who won, Stephanie! Talk about an amazing first week, and first time experience as a software engineer.

Stephanie is a true femgineer, spending her free time as a board member of Women Who Code, where she helps coordinate events for women, and even kids who code!

I’m definitely curious and excited to see how Stephanie’s career as a software engineer will evolve!

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5 March, 2013

Fostering Female Friendly Companies

Word on the streets of Silicon Valley is that companies want more femgineers… And sure we can all invest in the future and motivate young boys and girls to become engineers, like Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies are doing today, but what about right now? And why is this even important? Well I’ll tell just say two things about the current approach most companies are taking:

Bringing in a motivational speaker isn’t going to work. You can hire Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, and whomever else you can cajole to spend time at your company, but you’ll still be stuck. Why? Because it’s all inspirational. There is no plan. Young ladies don’t think “Hey I’ll become Sheryl or Marissa!” Many don’t even know what the first step is besides learning how to code. It’s not their fault. All that is touted lately is that they need to learn to code. Yet there are so many more steps to the process like networking, interviewing, negotiating for a salary, working with a team, producing quality code, you get the gist. But of course none of this is talked about, and there aren’t any clear steps and strategies. So how can companies expect to attract more femgineers right now?

Simply hosting hackathons and showcasing that you have some femgineers at your company will fail too. In the short term you’ll see a little spike in interest, and people will pat your company on the back for being female friendly. However, if you don’t actually implement a support structure in place one that has clear performance review criteria, mentorship, role models, and a flexible work environment then you can and should expect turnover.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but good intentions are just that good. If your company really cares about fostering a female friendly company to attract femgineers (believe me it will benefit males too), then just like you build and maintain a product systematically, you need to have a systematic approach for attracting, recruiting, and retaining femgineers.

And why is this even important? We can continue to crank out coders through a number of methods, but we also need to breed leaders. The only way to do that is to keep people in the industry long enough for them to hone their skills, and learn management strategies. The key to doing that is to have a supportive system, otherwise people will just leave, be disinterested in advancing, or worse yet not even know how to advance themselves! Right now tech is at the forefront of most industries for being known as progressive. We also have the unique position of being able to compensate well for high quality talent. But if we want to keep people in the industry, and maintain quality talent we have to put some processes in place.

Now I know what you’re saying: “Come on Poornima, give us the scoop!” Well here’s the deal, I’m usually one for spilling all my strategies, but this is one issue that I’m dead serious about. It’s NOT a marketing gimmick. You cannot pay lip service to a growing trend because you’re desperate for talent. And don’t make me out to be the bad gal in thinking that I’m holding out on femgineers, I’m not, I’m doing this for their own good too. I care about them working in places that will support their long term career growth and lifestyle. I’m willing to share my strategies with those who have the best intentions, and are willing to invest in putting a strategy in place.

So if you are interested you can reach out to me, and I’d be more than happy to host a Femgineer Forum at your company.

If you’re curious as to what that it entails here’s the approach the folks at CoverHound took. First they reached out to me, asking me to host an event for them, but they said it was really important that their current engineering team participate. I wholeheartedly agreed, and said it was a requirement. Next, we brainstormed topic ideas, and finally came to an agreement on what to focus on. CoverHound wanted me to focus on how females within organizations can change the culture from within in order to attract more females. I agreed to it. I’ll be hosting the next Femgineer Forum on April 2nd at the CoverHound office. You can see additional details here.

Let’s work together to foster companies that are friendly to folks!

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4 March, 2013

Pricing Your Products: Aim a Little Higher

By Justin Reyes

I recently read a book called Double your Freelancing Rate by Brennan Dunn. While the the book’s primary audience is freelancers, the reasons and strategies provided by Dunn apply to setting a price point for a product.

Dunn discusses two types of pricing models:

One based on features: where a fee is charged for a ﬁxed feature that you offer.
One based on value: where you set a price point based on the value of results that your customer is receiving.

Most startups do #1 , set their prices to match their competitors, or worse yet don’t even price their product for fear no one will buy it! They’re too afraid to charge a higher price or raise their prices for fear that it will deter customers from buying their product.

What is often the case, as Dunn mentions, is that most customers are curious about the high price point rather than being put off by it. Many will actually wonder, “Why is this product higher than the others? Is the service better?”

It does take people longer to make a decision to buy if a product is priced higher. However, the benefit to having a product that is priced higher than others, or raising the price of it is that you are signaling to potential customers that you have a quality product. You’ve created a product that you are confident will deliver results. If they are serious about getting results then they should try it out!

Pricing is never set in stone. You will of course iterate on it based on the feedback you receive from customers. But if you believe you can deliver a quality solution then set the price point high even for initial customers.

Justin Reyes is an web marketer noob, blogger, startup fanatic, coder (when need be) and obsessed with the Silicion Valley tech community.

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4 March, 2013

Femgineer Heading to SxSWi

I’ll be taking the annual expedition to SXSW. While it’s a veritable spring break for startup fiends and tech geeks I like to set some goals for what I’m going to accomplish. This years goals are actually quite simple and focused:

Spread the word about Femgineer. I’m sure many of you have noticed that for the past 6 months I’ve been heavily focused on teaching, blogging, and basically transforming Femgineer into a educational startup focused on helping highly skilled professionals level up in their careers. I always like to start building companies for a niche. So my initial customer base is tech professionals: engineers, designers, product managers, and tech entrepreneurs. I’ve also honed in my offerings to: a long form course on lean product development taught for 8 weeks a few times a year, and short workshops that I teach around the SF Bay Area. At SXSW I’ll be offering some specials to those who sign up for the next Lean Product Development course, which will begin at the end of April. But you have to be present and at SXSW to get the special!

Meet other Femgineers. I’ll be hosting a dinner, and inviting designers, developers, and product managers to attend. The focus of any conference is to network, but sometimes it’s nice to do in a more intimate setting with like-minded people who are from around the country. To keep it an intimate affair, I’m capping the attendee list to 25. If you’re interested in joining please RSVP. I’d like to thank our sponsor Social Chorus and my buddy from high school, David Cruz, for helping to make this event happen!

Catch up startup fiend friends from around the country. While I wish all my startup friends lives in SF, I’m actually really happy that they don’t. Not because I don’t want to see them regularly, but because I get the chance to hear what’s going on in their neck of the woods. Getting a different perspective is key to creativity. David Kadavy is one of my all time favorite SXSW buddies, and I have to thank my dear friend Abby Albright from high school for hosting me! I’m also really looking forward to meeting a few people I’ve been mentoring for months at the conference.

Every year SXSW gets bigger, and a lot of people complain about it. But I think you have to take it all in stride. The things I enjoy about the conference are learning more about design, networking, and above savoring delicious Texas BBQ!

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