Agencies, consultants and freelancers put a lot of time and effort into pricing the services in the proposals they present to clients.

[sc_fs_faq sc_id=”fs_faqny3wr0dh3″ html=”true” headline=”h2″ img=”” question=”What are the factors that go into the proposal pricing equation?” img_alt=”” css_class=”” ]1. difficulty of project <br>2. time it will take <br>3. quality of work <br>4. value to client <br>5. market competition <br>6. how much client will pay[/sc_fs_faq]

To get a more detailed explanation of how to price web design and digital marketing projects, click here.

Whichever method you choose to come up with pricing for your project, you’ll most likely always feel nervous about presenting it to your potential client.

The reason is simple: you’re afraid they’ll say no.

You don’t want to end up charging too much and scaring the client away. You always know that you’re probably competing against a lot of other folks who might be willing to work for a lot less than you are.

So you feel like you’re in a no win situation.

On the one hand you know the value you bring to the project and how much you should be charging. On the other hand you don’t want to pass up the opportunity of making money, even if it is less money than you feel that you deserve.

So you come up with your best guesstimate, put it in your proposal, present it to the client and cross your fingers, hold your breath and pray that he’ll say YES.

Now the truth is that it’s quite possible that the client can come back to you to try and negotiate your price. But in many cases, if the client isn’t happy with your price, he’ll just move on to a different service provider and just not get back to you.

The idea that you have one opportunity to get the client or lose the business can wreak havoc with your nerves.

The problem with this whole scenario is that you’ve forced your client into making a yes or no decision. He can either accept your price or not.

No one wants to be forced into choosing between all or nothing. When faced with that decision, many client will leave the table unless they are 100% sure they want to accept your price.

Is anyone ever 100% sure? Rarely.

That means that more often than not, the client will bolt and you’ll lose the business.

Pricing Options

Consulting guru Alan Weiss teaches to never frame your pricing as a “yes” or “no” choice; instead, present your clients with a choice of “yes’s.”

In other words, don’t force your client into choosing between YES and NO. Give them the opportunity to choose between YES, YES, YES or NO.

Everyone loves having choices. You walk into a clothing store and there are a dozen different kinds of jeans or shirts. You aren’t just presented with one style to take or leave.

You want to have options. It makes you feel like YOU are in control of your destiny, instead of the person selling to you.

Consulting company McKinsey has compiled statistics over the years that show how providing “different flavors of the same thing” can improve your firm’s chances of selling in a solution by at least 30%.

How do you create pricing options?

The simplest way is to first decide on the service that you’d ideally like to provide and that you believe to be optimal for the client. Make that option 2.

Then strip off some of the features of option 2 until you have the barest bones version, which is the minimum service level that you are willing to provide. That’s option 1.

Finally, add extra features onto option 2 to come up with your dream plan, which you would LOVE to provide your client — and you’ve got option 3.

The statistics say that your client is most likely to choose the middle option — #2 — in which case you’ve succeeded and gotten exactly what you hoped for.

The existence of option 3 makes option 2 look cheaper, so the client feels he’s getting a better deal. At the same time, the existence of option 1 makes the client feel like he’s getting more value (which he is) by choosing option 2.

Here’s an example from website design and development:

When a client asks you to build a website for him, he looks at the project as a single entity with one deliverable.

But you know that building a website contains many different components including strategy, structure, design, development, content, seo, special features, optimization, launch, training and support.

What you need to do is break out these component and then combine them into your 3 options.

The first, and cheapest, option would contain just a website without any content or seo services. Even though you know that you could add tremendous value by providing the client with content and seo services, in the event that the client either doesn’t have the budget for or simply doesn’t grasp the importance of these vital services, you still have the opportunity to get the business with your option 1 pricing plan.

Your second option is going to include content and SEO, and possible other elements that you deem relevant. You’ll price this option at the number you ideally expect to make for this kind of project.

Then you’ll create a third option that includes extra features or additional content and seo or addition support and maintenance or a combination of any or all of the above. This is your exclusive plan that is more expensive than option 2. It’s the plan that you’d love to get, but you’d still be happy if you just got option 2.

Now it’s the client’s choice. And you win with whatever plan the client chooses.

You might initially think that offering pricing options won’t work for your particular service. But you should think twice, because while it might not work for every service, it will work for most. All you need to do is be a bit creative to come up with various options by breaking down your service into smaller pieces.

Bottom Line

Including a few pricing options in your proposal will increase your chances of winning the project by giving the client choices — which everyone appreciates.

If you want a simple and quick way to add pricing options to a proposal, please check out Propfire.com, where we make the process super easy and intuitive.

Try Propfire Free for 14 days! (no cc required)

Proposal Pricing Models

How to price a web design proposal.

Let’s say there’s a company who wants you to build them a new website. How do you charge for the project?

There are several different pricing models you can use. Some of them should be combined while some should not be used at all.

[To read more about the challenges of selling web design services, and how to solve them, click here]

Let’s go through each pricing model and decide whether, and how, to use them.

Time Based

In the time based pricing method, you’d estimate how many hours it would take to complete the web design project and multiply that by your rate. If it will take you 25 hours to build the website and you charge $100 per hour, then the total price will be $2,500.

Here’s why I don’t like using this method.

If you’re an experienced designer and your building the website on WordPress (which is a common scenario), then you’ll probably be using a template that you’ve used many times before and are super familiar with.

That being the case, there’s no way it’s going to take you more than 10 hours to build the website. In fact, if your creative engines are flowing, you might be able to do it in just a couple of hours. At $100 an hour, that’s way below the original $2,500.

The easy way around this is to simply quote the client the number of hours that gets you to the number you’re looking for. So you can say the job will take 40 hours at $100 an hour for a total of $4,000.

The problem with the time based web design proposal is that it leaves you open to having the client question your time estimate or rate. The client might say, “there’s no way that it’s going to take you 40 hours to build a website” or “$100 an hour seems a bit high for a web designer” — and she might have a point.

So now you’re in a position where you have to prove the veracity of your numbers, which you might or might not be able to do.

I don’t ever want to be in that position, and neither do you.

The fundamental flaw with time based pricing is that it doesn’t take into account your level of expertise and experience.

For example, let’s say you’re hiring a singer to perform at a concert for 1 hour. You reach out to James, the local wedding singer, and to Billy Joel. They’re both singers and they’ll be performing for the same 1 hour. Do you think their price will be the same? Of course not!

The same is true for web design. The reason you can do a web design project in just 5 hours, which would take someone else 25 hours, is because you have a decade of experience and learning behind you.

You are the Billy Joel of web design, so the fact that a gig takes you an hour is irrelevant. You need to be paid for your experience and expertise, not just the actual time spent on the project.

You should never charge by the hour or give an hourly estimate. And if the client asks you simply explain that you don’t charge by the hour because you’ve been doing this work for a long time and have a lot of experience, which allows you to work much more productively and quickly than others.

But in most cases you won’t have to explain yourself, because just saying that you charge by the project and not by the hour should be sufficient.

Competitive Web Design Pricing

In competitive pricing, you find out what your web design competitors are charging and charge the same or less.

The only way to do this is if you can find out what your competitors are charging for the particular project you’re vying for. And the only way to find out is to ask, if you get that opportunity.

The problem with copying your competitors pricing is that unless you know exactly what services and deliverables they are offering for their price, you can end up charging way too little for way too much work.

And the only way you’ll find out exactly what they’re offering is to see their web design proposal, which is extremely unlikely to happen.

You also don’t want to get into a race for the bottom, as we discussed earlier.

However, using your competition as a guideline for your own pricing is a useful tactic (if you can get that information) and should be integrated into your pricing strategy.

Client Web Design Budget

Since we’re discussing competitive pricing, I think it’s a good time to talk about client budgets.

You always want to find out what a client’s budget is, or what they’re expecting to pay, for the project that you’re bidding on before giving them a web design proposal.

The best, and really only, way to find out is to ask — “What is your budget for the project?”

If they say they don’t know or don’t have one, you can give them some options like, “are you thinking of 10k or more like 50k?”

You can also ask how much they paid for their current website (if they have one), to give you some perspective. Or you can ask if they’ve gotten any other quotes, and what the range is.

If you push a bit, in a nice way, you will get an answer.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience:

Example 1:

I was meeting a potential client for the first time and pitching them on our web design service. It was a company that had a website but wanted it totally rebuilt with a new look and functionality.

After I had heard everything they were looking for I thought to myself that I would quote them around $12k, maybe $15k. Luckily, I kept this to myself and instead, asked them what their budget was. They replied that they didn’t really know and wanted me to tell them how much it would cost. So I asked them how much they paid for their old site and…bingo, they said $24k.

Hello!!

Once I heard what they spent on their old website, I knew that I could charge at least that much. But since I wanted to close the deal asap and avoid competing with other firms, I quoted them $20k on my proposal and won the gig.

Had I not asked them about their budget and what they had paid for the old site, I would have left between 5 and 8 thousand bucks on the table (for the same work).

Example 2:

I pitched to a large real estate company looking to redesign their website. It was a significant amount of work. The meeting went really well. My initial thought was to charge around $25k, but I knew better to go with my instincts alone…so I asked, “What is your budget for the project?”

They said something like, “in the tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands.” They even told me that they had gotten a quote on the high end for over $100k. That was exactly what I needed to hear. I gave them a proposal at $65k.

No, we did not get the gig, but it was not because of pricing. In fact, they went with a more expensive agency because they had some capabilities that we didn’t.

The lesson is clear: always ask clients about their budget and expectations before quoting them a price.

Client Expectations

I discussed finding out what the client’s expectations were related to paying for a web design project in the previous section. But I want to go one step further with how client expectations should affect your pricing.

Individuals, sole proprietors and really small businesses expect to pay as little as possible for a website (and any service). Larger businesses expect to pay more for stuff. In fact, the larger and more corporate the organization, the more they expect, and are willing, to pay.

Therefore, if you’re pitching a web design proposal to a company with revenue in the millions and above, you need to jack up your prices just to seem credible. If you are too cheap, they’ll disregard you as either being too small or inexperienced.

If you’re pitching even a basic WordPress website to a larger company, you should not price it for less than $10,000. Trust me, they won’t bat an eyelid.

The bigger the company, the higher you should price your services.

The only caveat to this is that you must present yourself in a highly professional manner to back up your price. Corporations want to work with skilled professionals who will get the job done efficiently and effectively — and they’re happy to pay a premium for that.

If you can’t look and act professional, then you should stick to the $1,000 websites. The bigger money is for professionals who can inspire confidence in their work and abilities and can provide clients with an efficient and non stressful high quality experience.

Value to Client

Another pricing strategy is based on the value that you are providing to the client. In other words, how valuable is the website to the client’s business?

Websites that generate revenue for a client are going to be more valuable than brochure or informational sites.

That’s why ecommerce sites, in addition to their greater complexity, can be significantly more expensive than non ecommerce sites.

If you’re using WordPress with Woocommerce to build an ecommerce site, it might not take you that much longer to build than a regular site. But the fact that it is an ecommerce site and will generate revenue allows you to charge much more for it, because the client clearly sees the value in having it. The site will generate tangible revenue, as opposed to a corporate site that might have long term benefits, but no direct revenue.

As another example, a website for a business that is solely online has more value to a client than an informational site for a brick and mortar.

Taking the value of the website to the client into account when pricing your project is definitely a practice you should incorporate into your pricing strategy.

Part 3 – Adding Value

At this point you should have a better idea of how to price your web design proposal by using and combining some of the pricing strategies we’ve laid out.

But at the end of the day, even with the greatest pricing strategy, there’s only so much that you can charge for a website. That price will vary greatly depending on the type of client and complexity of the project. But if the only service you are offering is web design, you will hit a price ceiling that you will find almost impossible to break through.

Clients are not stupid. They know how to use Google (at least most of them do).

It isn’t very hard to Google how much a website should cost and come up with dozens of posts with various prices. Or they can look at the sites of other web design agencies that have price quotes for all to see.

Of course you can’t expect to be held to price quotes from offshore web design agencies, and every project is unique and there are lots of other factors that clients need to consider.

That’s all true.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that clients can easily get a ballpark idea of what the price range is for the website they’re looking to develop. And unless you are a major, brand name, design agency, you’re going to have to play within that general range in order to be in the game.

Clients are also usually going to get multiple quotes. If those quotes are ranging between $1,500 and $3,000, you’re going to have to make a compelling case of why you want to charge $5,000 or $10,000.

In this section I’m going to show you how you can charge $10,000 for a website that others are charging $3,000 for.

It’s really quite simple and intuitive: adding value.

Most of the US based web designers out there that are charging low prices are providing only one specific service — web design.

Well, isn’t that what the client wants — a website?

Absolutely not.

When a client asks for a business website, what they are really looking for is a tool to achieve their business objectives.

In the case of an ecommerce site, that objective is clear — to sell more product.

The goal of a corporate website could be to enhance the reputation of the company or to provide customers with relevant content or to get more exposure via search.

In order to charge more for building a website you need to provide the client with the elements necessary to help him achieve his business objectives.

When you do that, you become able to charge not only for the web design, but for all those other elements that the client needs.

Here are some of those elements:

Planning and Setup
You need to meet with your client for one or more discovery sessions to understand their objectives and what exactly they’re looking for in a website. You might also need to inventory their assets, like logos, images, written content etc.

This stuff is a given to you, but it needs to be broken out as a service you are providing. Your time is valuable and you should be compensated for it.

Marketing strategy
Every website must be based on a marketing strategy that defines the client’s business objectives and how the website can help achieve them.

It should include things like customer persona, competitive analysis, content and functionality requirements.

You should be offering marketing strategy as part of your web design package.

Seo
Every business wants to get found more on Google, and SEO is the way to make that happen. Most designers ignore SEO. You shouldn’t because it’s something that clients will find valuable and be willing to pay for.

The elements of SEO that you should included in your web design package are:

• Keyword Research and Selection
• Competitive Analysis
• Onpage SEO for each page
• Google Business Page
• Bing Business Listing
• Basic directory links (you can use an outside service for this and charge extra for it)

Content
A website without good content is worthless. Most clients don’t know what content they need and how to structure and create it.

Recommending what content they should have and structuring that content on the website is something that most web designers can’t or don’t do. By doing that you are adding value to your service, which you can charge for.

If you’re capable of doing so, you can also offer to write the website content, or at least edit the client’s content.

A great tool to use for streamlining the process of getting content from clients is contentsnare.com.

Functionality
Any functionality that the client wants to add should be charged for, even if all you need to do is add a plugin to make it happen. The client doesn’t need to know how easy it is for you to do. All they need to see is the final result.

Some common functionalities that are pretty easy to implement include:

• Live chat
• Email capture and adding to list
• Content upgrade
• Exit popup
• Interactive form

Social
Adding social media sharing and liking capabilities to the website might seem like a given to you since it’s pretty much just a matter of adding a WordPress plugin, but clients see it as an added value, and they don’t know how hard or easy it is to implement. They just want it done, and will pay for that.

You can also offer to create their social media profiles on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc.

Mobile
Every website should be mobile responsive. Doing so should be part of your normal operating procedures. But it’s not always easy to implement and involves planning and skill. Not all web designers are careful to implement mobile compatibility. But you are.

Clients understand the importance of mobile compatibility, and are willing to pay for it.

Launch
You should be developing your client website on your own development server or host so that you maintain full control over it until you get your final payment.

When you’re ready to launch, and get your final payment, you’ll need to move the site over to the client’s host — unless you’re providing hosting as an added service.

Moving a site to a different server could go smoothly, or could be a nightmare. That’s why you should be charging for it.

Training
You need to teach them how to use their new website admin. This can be done in person or via screencast.

Post launch support
You’ll be there to fix anything that’s broken because of your work and to answer their questions. If they want an ongoing maintenance plan, you can give them one as well.

Now that we’ve gone through all of these value added elements, let’s see how it affects your pricing.

Here’s one example of how a $2,500 web design proposal turns into a $10,000 project:

I do NOT recommend showing the client this breakdown unless he specifically demands it.

The reason for that is that I don’t want to give clients the opportunity to start bargaining with me by trying to delete individual services. That’s because I believe that every service I’ve listed is integral to the building of a website.

You can’t have a website without SEO or content or strategy or optimization etc. So if a client tries to say, “Ok, get rid of the SEO” I’ll tell him that it’s going to be detrimental to his business and take much of the value out of the site — and that for those reasons I don’t build websites without SEO.

Breaking down a website project by its tasks and services makes it easier for you to justify your pricing to yourself. Then you can more confidently present your total price and explain the different components that you include in a web design proposal — without giving him the specific prices for each line item.

Here’s how a conversation might go after you present the client with a $10,000 quote:

Client: This is way more than other designers have quoted me.

You: How much have they quoted?

Client: $2,500

You: I also charge $2,500 for design. But to create a website that is a tool to achieve your business objectives, you need more than design.

Client: Huh?

You: You need strategy, content, SEO, functionality, mobile etc. I don’t just design websites. I create marketing tools that help you get more business.

Client: Ok, I get it now.

If the client says he doesn’t care about any of that other stuff, and that all he wants is a website, you can either do the site for $2,500 or move on to bigger and better things. The choice is yours.

But if the client has the budget and is serious about business, he will get the message.

He might still try to negotiate, at which point you can press your value case, offer a discount or a payment plan. But you will be negotiating from a place of confidence.

Beyond the specific services and deliverables you are offering, your value case should be based on your professionalism, integrity, experience and customer service.

Good clients are willing to pay a premium for a provider whom they can trust and depend on to complete the project and be around to support it.

Pricing Options

Research shows that people like to have options. It gives them a sense of control instead of feeling forced to either accept or reject a single offer.

I recommend that, whenever possible, you give the client 2 or 3 pricing options in your web design proposal.

For example:

Option 1: Basic website package without extra functionality – $10,000

Option 2: Website with additional functionality – $13,500

Option 3: Option 2 + additional SEO and support – $16,000

You can play around with the options and pricing to come up with something that works for you.

The point is to make the client feel like he’s in control of his destiny.

In most cases the client will go for the middle option, or you might even get lucky and get option 3. But if you price it properly, the worst case scenario will be pretty darn good for you as well.

You win either way and the client feels like he won too.

I believe in pricing options so strongly that I integrated it into my proposal software Propfire. So when you create a proposal on Propfire, you can easily add pricing options. (To try Propfire for free, click here.)

Here’s an example:

Warning Signs

As much as we all want to win new web design business, in some cases it’s probably to your benefit to pass and move on.

I know, it’s really hard to pass up a new client.

From my experience, the clients that are willing to pay your full price without too much of a fight are usually not going to pose a problem.

It’s usually the ones that bargain you down and force you to significantly discount your price that end up being the most trouble.

So before you cave in and agree to do a $10k website for $2,500, please take a moment and think carefully about these things:

How easy is it going to be for you to work with this client?
You can usually see the warning signs right off the bat. Working with an asshole is not fun. It will drain every ounce of your strength, destroy your wellbeing and make you miserable. No money is worth that.

Is the client indecisive?
If the answer is yes — the client is indecisive, then you should probably pass because you’ll be asked to make design after design while she continues to tell you that she isn’t sure that it’s right yet. The process will be endless and even if you specify limits in your proposal, you’ll find yourself working on the same project for years. Literally. Are you ok with that?

How enthusiastic is the client about getting the project done?
If a client doesn’t really care when the project gets done then he will get busy with other things and not be responsive to your requests for assets (like content, images etc.) or reviews and approvals. He might even disappear for a year or more before reappearing again … maybe.

When a project drags on for months (or longer), it can have a significant negative effect on your ability to manage your time and plan and work on other projects.

Is taking on this client going to benefit your overall reputation and brand?
I once met with a potential client who reached out to us about doing some digital marketing work. It turns out that the client owned several men’s spas — the kind where treatments “end happily” (wink wink). There was plenty of ongoing work to be had — all paid in cash, of course.

We actually did a small project as a test — and getting 12 crisp $100 bills didn’t hurt one bit. But after some serious discussions and soul searching, my team decided that we just couldn’t get involved with this kind of work. Besides the moral hesitations, we also didn’t want to become branded as the agency of the “underworld”.

The money might have been great, but it’s not the direction we wanted to take, both on a personal and business level. So we passed on the happy ending with that client — but we’ve never been happier for making that decision.

Bottom Line: Just because someone is willing to pay you for work, does not mean you have to accept it. Think carefully about how the client will affect you personally, and your business, before accepting any work that comes your way.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve gotten some useful guidance and practical tips about how to price your web design proposals to make more money.

Choose the strategies and tactics that work for you, and implement them on your next potential client. You can always discount your prices if necessary.

But if you’re confident in the value you bring to the project, and you clearly communicate that value to your client, there is a great chance that you’ll get the price that you want, or close to it.

You do great work and have invested a lot to acquire valuable skills and knowledge that clients need.

It’s time you started getting compensated appropriately for your web design work.

Use the strategies and tactics you’ve learned here to make that happen!

To try Propfire for FREE for 14 days click here.

This is the story of how I built a SaaS product — Propfire — without being a developer, or hiring one. The reason I’m writing it is to give non technical founders a blueprint to follow (or at least some hope) in their own startup journey.

Propfire is proposal creation software that I built using html, css, javascript, php and mysql.

I didn’t use any frameworks such as Laravel (php) or React or Vue (javascript) — not that there’s anything wrong with using a framework. In fact, using a framework would probably have been a smart idea and possibly made my app better in some ways.

But the reason I didn’t is simply because I would have had to learn a framework on top of the basic php and javascript code — and I wasn’t prepared to invest that kind of time to build an MVP. I wanted to do it as quickly as possible (I’m sure you do to).

Now, the first step to any development process is obviously having the idea of what you want to create. But for the purposes of this post I’m going to skip over why I chose to build Propfire and stick with the process of developing the actual software. You can read about why I decided to create Propfire in a market already crowded with competitors here.

Who am I

Before I dive into the details of my development experience, I need to tell you a bit about who I am and the skills I brought to the table when I began my development project.

For the last 7 years I’ve been building WordPress websites and providing SEO and content marketing services for companies. The website development part of my services entails working with a few professionally designed templates that I’ve gotten very familiar with over the years, and modifying them with basic CSS.

If you’ve ever worked with WordPress you know that you do not need to have any development or coding skills to create a beautiful website. All you need is the ability to organize information (no simple task) and work with whatever website building engine your particular template provides. There are even tools that will generate custom css code without you having to know how to write it.

But I don’t want to portray myself as a total coding ignoramus. Back in the years 1999 – 2000 I had learned how to code html from a book and then ridden the dot com wave to get jobs at a couple of internet companies (which are long gone) where I had the opportunity to perfect my html and learn ASP (not the same as ASP.net) and some SQL (on the job). For those of you who don’t remember ASP, it’s very similar to PHP.

While I in no way became a coding expert working at those companies, I did have the opportunity to learn from more experienced developers the basic structure of a web app — how to set up database tables and how to move data from a web page to the database and extract and display data back on the page. Once you know how to pass information to and from web pages and into and out of a database, you’re well on your way to creating a data-driven web app.

Structure vs Implementation

The most important part of the development process is understanding the flow of your application. You need to map out exactly what happens on each page or screen of your app. Once you know what data you want to get, manipulate and display, and where you want to do that, the task of writing the code to make it happen is something that you can either figure out yourself or pay someone a relatively small amount to do for you.

The most expensive (and probably least effective) way of developing an application as a non developer is to come up with an idea and then hire a developer (or team) to turn that idea into a functioning product — unless you just want to copy an existing product. For example, if you decide you want to create a Tinder clone with your own branding, you can find developers who can do that pretty efficiently by simply copying the original. That’s because the structure and flow (and UX) of the app already exists — and that’s the hard part.

A lot of the time I invested into developing Propfire was spent figuring out the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) of the application. I wanted to create a way for a user to build a proposal in a way that was faster and more intuitive than the way all the competitors do it (via design templates).

I began by drawing the individual screens of my app on sheets of paper (one screen per sheet) and put them in order. Then I went through each screen  as a user (over and over) to determine the most user friendly and intuitive experience.

I’ll admit that my knowledge of basic database table structures helped by through this phase, because as I was moving through the screens I was also mapping out how the information being entered would be efficiently stored and accessed.

Understanding how to store data in a relational database has more to do with organizing information than with coding. You don’t need technical skills to organize information. But you do need a basic understanding of how a database and data tables work, which I got from a book around 20 years ago. The principles of storing and managing data haven’t changed.

You do not have to be a database guru to create the data tables for your app. All you need our the basics, which you can learn from books, tutorials or online course. Again, database design requires the ability to organize information — not technical or coding skills.

So up to this point I had not written a single line of code, but I already had the the UI and theoretical functionality of my app. And like I said before, once you have this, the actual writing of the code becomes a technical task that can be outsourced or done on your own.

Type of App Matters

Stop for a second. I need to clarify something important.

This post is referring to an application that uses existing technology to accomplish a task. The innovation is in the design of the application — figuring out a more efficient and effective way to accomplish the desired task. That’s why the coding part fo the application development is something that any skilled coder should be able to do quite easily.

However, if you want to develop new technology or a sophisticated algorithm to accomplish a complex task, then you are going to have to get expert programmers to work on developing that technology — and that’s way beyond the scope of DIY or ordinary outsourcing.

Just keep that in mind :)

Development Path

My plan from the start was to create an application for as little money as possible. I just wanted a functional MVP (minimum viable product) to test the market. I could always build more features after I’d found product market fit.

If I could create the flow of the application and all of the screens, I knew I’d always be able to find a developer to code it (although I never actually priced it out).

Of course, there’s a wide range in quality when dealing with developers, and the price you pay is going to be directly related to that quality. If you need a developer to do the thinking for you and create the application flow and screens, then you’re going to have to pay a lot more than if you’re just looking for someone to code up your screens.

Building without code

After a few months of thinking, mapping, rethinking and rethinking again, I had all my screens and knew exactly how I wanted my application to work (at least version 1). Now all I needed to do is build it!

Like I said before, I didn’t have a big development budget to play with. Even if I did, I believe in the MVP model, especially since I had no idea whether people would actually want to use (and pay for) my product. So there was no way I was mortgaging the house or selling my son’s Xbox to pay a developer to create my MVP (you probably shouldn’t either).

I needed to build Propfire, or at least most of it, myself.

How was I going to build a data driven application?

My first thought was to see if I could find a way to create my app without having to code, at all.

In the past I had played around with a very cool program called Bubble, which according to its website “is a code-free programming language that lets you build and host web applications without engineers.” In other words, Bubble lets you build stuff visually (like using a website builder tool), while creating the actual code behind the scenes.

Sounds great, and it really is. You can create lots of very cool stuff using Bubble.

One of my hesitations in using Bubble was that you can’t modify or export the underlying code. It’s created in the Bubble framework and has to be hosted on the Bubble platform. If at some point I’d want to hire developers to improve or expand the app, they would need to rebuild it from scratch in whatever language they were using.

But this wasn’t a deal breaker for me. The Bubble folks claim to have a very stable and scalable hosting problem, and the price was ok. And if at some point my app was so successful that I needed to rebuild it, then I’d be able to afford the extra development work.

The reason I did not use Bubble to build Propfire is because I found the platform to be constraining. I tried building it on the platform but I found that I couldn’t perform some of the data operations I needed to. Now that could be totally my own fault, for not fully understanding or implementing the Bubble capabilities.

For all I know Bubble might absolutely have the capabilities to do everything I needed to do and more. But I did spend a decent amount of time trying to figure it out and it just wasn’t happening, for whatever reason. At the same time I new that these data operation could be easily done in a few lines of code.

So despite the allure of being able to visually develop an app without writing a single line of code, I opted to try it the good ole way — writing code.

[Again, I don’t want to downplay the power of Bubble and other code free platforms. People have been lots of functioning apps on them and there’s a whole sub-industry of Bubble developers available to help you build yours. Depending on the complexity of your app, using Bubble or an alternative might be the smartest way to go.]

Choosing a Language

The first thing you need to code is a language to write it in. Google something like “what language should I code my web app in” and you’ll find an ongoing debate as to what language is the best and easiest and neatest etc. The bottom line of the debate is that it depends on what you want to build and what language you already have some familiarity with.

Web applications require HTML to display the pages on a browser, CSS to style to pages, and at least some Javascript or Jquery to make stuff happen on the page without having to refresh the browser window. If the app is data driven, you need a language that can send and retrieve data to and from the database from your web pages. You can accomplish that with different languages, including javascript (nodes).

Remember I told you that I learned ASP around 20 years ago and that it’s similar to php? Well, it just so happens that php is probably the most popular scripting language to build data driven web apps with. Some of the most famous apps built in php include WordPress (which includes the hundreds of millions of websites built on the platform), Yahoo and Wikipedia.

The reason PHP is so popular is because it’s relatively easy to learn and use. And there’s plenty of documentation and code examples available. So since I already had some basic knowledge of the language structure, I chose to go with php.

Setting Up

Before writing any code, you need some prerequisites to get started.

1. Code Editor
   All you really need to write is code is a basic text editor like textedit (mac) or notepad (win). But if you want some help, in the form of highlighting, formatting, auto-completion and other useful tools, then you’ll need to use a code editor. There are lots of them available for either man or pc, and free or paid.I chose Visual Studio Code by Microsoft — the mac version (since I use a Macbook Air) — because it’s free and I liked the feel of it. You can also try Atom, which has lots of great reviews.None of these editors are going to actually write the code for you, although they’ll let you know when you’ve made an error and sometimes save you some typing by providing code snippets you can use.Don’t spend a month trying to figure out which code editor to use. Just pick one and grow to love it.
2. Local Server
   To view the results of your HTML, CSS and Javascript code, all you need is your browser. To view php (which is a server-side scripting language) you need a server. Macs and PCs come with a local server, but you need to set it up and get it running properly.Setting up my local server on my Macbook scared the hell out of me. It almost discouraged me from continuing. Luckily, I found this article which had very clear, step by step instructions on how to get the job done.
3. Local Database
   Since my app was data-driven, I also needed to set up a local database. The most popular choice is MySQL, which you can download for free here. The same article that showed me how to set up my local server covered the MySQL installation and the installing of SequelPro, which is a tool to manage MySQL with a visual interface.

To clarify, the development environment I just described setting up allowed me to code and view only on my computer (local).  I would eventually need to host the app with a hosting company, to get it “online”. But for the time being I was fine working local.

Start Building

I had my code editor and my local server and database setup. Now I had to actually start writing code!

There are 2 parts to a web app: the functionality and the presentation. In other words, what the app actually does behind the scenes and how it looks to the user.

You can start on the functionality and leave the interface for later. I personally wanted to have a concrete idea of the app interface would look before diving into the functionality.

As I explained before, web pages are built primarily with HTML and CSS, along with some Javascript or JQuery for doing certain tasks in the browser window (without refreshing the page) like manipulating images and text (and tons of other cool things).

Since I knew how to write HTML and (some) CSS I could theoretically code the web interface from scratch. To make things easier I could use Bootstrap, which is “a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS- and JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components.” (wikipedia)

But building a web interface from scratch, and making it look awesome (on both desktop and mobile), takes a lot of time and hard work. There’s an easier way: I found a free html web interface template built on Bootstrap.

You can find these html templates with a simple Google search, or on Themeforest. An html template comes with lots of different page templates and elements that you can pick and choose from to find the right ones for your app. It also comes with CSS stylesheets and various Javascript and Jquery functionalities to choose from.

Setting up an html template can be a bit difficult at first and take some time, but once you understand the structure and set it up, the work is done and you’ve got a beautiful interface for your app.

After my interface was in place, I created my database. A database is made up of tables that store different data. The tables relate to each other. That’s why they call it a relational database. I can’t teach you how to build a database, but again, it’s all about organizing information, not programming or coding.

Google is the answer

While I had some basic knowledge of php, I couldn’t actually code an application from scratch. However, I could look at existing code, figure out what is was doing and modify it.

That’s where Google came into the picture.

In theory what I should have done was to take a course on to learn how to write php cod, from A to Z. And I have gone through some “Learn PHP” books over the years. But the learning from the bottom up route would take me a very long time, which was something I absolutely dod not want to do.

My goal was not to be become a php developer. All I wanted to accomplish was to build my app. So instead of searching for a course or book, I went on Google and starting search for the php code that would accomplish the specific task I needed at that moment.

And because of my familiarity with php and how web apps are supposed to work, I knew just enough to know what to search for. There are LOTS of resources out there on writing code, in pretty much any language. My focus was php, Javascript and jQuery.

For specific questions, Stack Overflow, a forum where developers ask questions and other developers answer them, was a Godsend. Any question I had, no matter how specific, had already been asked and answered on Stack Overflow. Another great site with tons of code for the taking is phppot.

It’s really quite amazing what you can find out there. Sometimes I found examples of code that I could copy and slightly modify. Other times it was small snippets of code from Stack Overflow that did the trick.

The bottom line is that you can pretty much copy and paste your way to a complete, functioning application. All you need is just enough knowledge and familiarity with the language and the basics of how an app works to modify the code to your own needs and to know where to place it.

I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that you can easily throw together an app by just copying and pasting. You can’t. You need to understand enough to know what code you need and then how to integrate it into your app. You also need to weed through a lot of search results and code that isn’t right or doesn’t work for you before you find the code that does work.

BUT — if you can educate yourself enough, you can hack together something that really works!

Putting it online

It took me about 2 or 3 months of off and on coding (which still doing my other digital consulting work) to complete most of the code for the app, which was still living on the local drive of my Macbook. In order to use certain online scripts, set up my registration and payment process and see how the app looked on a mobile device, I needed to move it to a website hosting platform.

There are loads of hosting companies to choose from. I use Pressable for all of my WordPress sites, including the Propfire marketing site. But since Pressable focuses exclusively on WordPress and my app wasn’t WordPress, I decided to go with Cloudways. It’s cloud based, inexpensive and very scalable for when my app gets huge :)

Cloudways also lets you easily create a staging site, which is important to have in order to test changes before pushing them directly to your live app. In other words, you write your code on your local machine, test it on your staging server and then push it to your live server.

Accepting Payments

If you plan on charging for your app, you need a way of accepting and managing payments and subscriptions. I chose to use Stripe as my payment processor, but there was no way I could integrate it into my app (or even if I could, it would take me much too long to figure out how).

I found a few services that provide a ready made integration with Stripe that you can just add to your site. I chose Servicebot (because it was the cheapest option), which lets you easily create nice pricing tables and handles the subscription registration and billing via Stripe.

Servicebot costs me $49 a month, whereas simply using Stripe is free. But I would have had to pay a developer to integrate it for me and it would have been difficult to manage on an ongoing basis. With Servicebot I still had to pay a developer a small amount to integrate, but now I can easily change my pricing tables and manage my users and subscribers on my own. And it also handles the login/registration process on the app.

In general, I always try to keep things as simple as possible so that I don’t need to rely on developers for most tasks. Servicebot makes my life easier, so I’m happy to pay the monthly fee.

There are lots of other subscription management providers, with different features and at different price points, to choose from, so do some research before picking one.

Using a Developer

Since I mentioned using a developer to integrate Servicebot, I’ll make a couple of quick points about working with developers.

Unless you’re well funded, you’re probably going to use a freelance developer. I found mine on Upwork several years ago when I was working on another project. He’s located in South America. I’ve also used an offshore development shop before.

I personally prefer working with a solo developer over a firm because I can communicate directly with him instead of going through a project manager or some kind of management tier. But there are pros and cons to either, so go with what works best for you.

The most important thing is to work with someone you feel you can trust.

An offshore developer is going to be much cheaper than a US based one. In some cases the cheaper price might reflect less experience or lower skill level. But there are plenty of very experienced developers, especially PHP developers, who will do an awesome job for a fraction of the cost of a US developer because of the lower cost of living in their native land (and because they really want the work). The trick is finding them, and that is often a process of trial and error or just pure luck.

When you’re sending your developer a task, you MUST include specific instructions — the more detailed the better. Some developers will be able to figure things out on your own or read your mind. Most will not. The best way to avoid costly misunderstandings and screwups is to communicate CLEARLY, preferably in writing.

A really good developer will tell you if you’re what you’re asking makes no sense or won’t work as planned. But when you’re dealing with someone halfway across the globe, for whom English is a second (or third) language, you have to anticipate the possibility of communication difficulties and therefore be extra careful in created clear and detailed specs and instructions.

Also, you can’t expect to get an immediate answer from a freelancer in a different time zone. That’s why it’s best to be familiar enough with your code to troubleshoot in an emergency.

In my case, I’ve had to troubleshoot the few snippets of code I got my developer to write. And the few tasks I give him tend to take longer than expected. But as far as I’ve “hacked” on my own, there are still some difficult tasks that are simply beyond my pay grade and I’m not willing to spend the time it would take to learn enough to do them. That’s when I’ll turn to my developer — when I simply can’t (or won’t) do it myself.

At some point, when Propfire is making lots of money, I’ll hire a good developer and fly from there. For now, i pay only for the stuff I can’t figure out on my own.

Support Center

One of the things I put a lot of effort into was crafting the copy on my app to make sure the instructions on each page were clear enough for new users to follow without asking for help. But there will always be question, so I needed to create a support center.

There are several major help center software tools on the market. I chose Zoho, primarily because of its free plan. You can check out the Propfire support center here.

Then I got to work writing knowledge base articles.

In addition to the support center, which is a separate site, I wanted to provide users with help directly on the app pages. To do that would entail manually coding hotspots in different places and showing relevant help messages upon hover or click (in Javascript). It would take a good deal of time and work to create, and I was not looking forward to it.

Just as I was stressing about it, as if by Divine intervention, Appsumo offered a lifetime deal on tooltip.io, an app that makes it super easy to add and manage in-app messages of all types including tooltips, slide outs, popups and lots of other types. Huge problem solved, for only $49 (lifetime). Thank you Appsumo!

If you’re building or planning to build something, you should definitely be following the Appsumo deals because you’ll find some real gems which will (at some point) make your life easier for a heck of a lot less than you would otherwise have to pay for them.

Next Steps

Taking your app “live” might be the end of your development journey…well, at least phase 1 or it. Unless you’ve performed the most thorough testing possible, you’re going to find bugs and things that seemed to work really well at the time, but now don’t seem that great anymore and need to be changed.

You also should always be trying to improve your product. New use cases will arise that will motivate you to tweak the way the app works. Maybe that tweak will turn into a major change.

And now that the development is done for a while, the real hard work begins: marketing (i.e. getting paid users!). I’ll be writing another post about what I’m doing in that regard real soon.

I hope this post has at least given other non technical founders the courage and motivation to try their hands at developing their own SaaS product.

Feel free to reach out with questions :)

Oh yeah…try Propfire free for 14 days!