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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack Today's episode is a segment for my interview with Senior Software Engineer Ian Svoboda. Now be sure to catch the entire interview on the WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit the WPminute.com to access the episode and a whole lot more.
Eric Karkovack (00:24)
I noticed one of the interesting things that you're doing these days is you have ⁓ development plans for folks to subscribe to. have two different plans, right? Different costs. And I want to know how that's working for you because so many of us
You know, we have like maintenance plans maybe where we charge a set amount of dollars a month, but you're doing this more on a, hey, you want custom development. I'm going to give you custom development. Here's how much it costs for a month of that. And here's what you get. How is that working for you so far? And what, you know, what made you decide to go that route with your business?
Ian Svoboda (01:01)
Well, I'll try to answer that in a few different parts as best I can. There's a couple of different things there. So I think that this subscription model in general, like the concept sort of for this thing was probably most popularized by the design joy guy, Brett. I don't know if you are familiar with that. He actually had a course that he did even that taught the method, which I haven't done or anything, but I have a friend.
Eric Karkovack (01:22)
Yeah.
Ian Svoboda (01:28)
kind of brought up the idea and I know this other guy whose name is Joey, shout out to Joey, who does this type of business model also. And sort of it got me thinking like, is this an offer that matters? Is this something that somebody might find value? Because that's really what it depends on, right? Is the person that I would want to buy this gonna look at this and go, that looks like a deal to me. And so the...
I guess the impetus, if that's the right word behind all this was like, nobody likes reviewing hours. Almost every client that I've had in the last few years has never actually reviewed the hours that I do. Like they don't go through it with a fine tooth comb and be like, Hey man, why'd you take three hours? Do this thing over here? Because most of them, A, don't either don't know that information in the first place because they're not actually a developer and we're not scoping every single little thing in advance or B,
they just have a sense of that from like what the invoices are and they go, well, I'm getting like really good output here and I'm happy with the out, like I'm getting quality work. It's being done in a timely fashion. This all seems fine. And that's kind of how it mostly works out anyway. And so I've kind of thought to myself, if you could take away the whole stigma of hours and how many hours does this thing take or what have you.
it sort of simplifies the whole approach and you can make it more of a partnership and a conversation. So it's like you have an expectation of I'm not going to send you five things that are really complicated and they're all going to be done tomorrow. Right. And a really big project would get broken up into these individual tasks, but it's like, we're not working on a million things at once, working on one thing at a time. And as you provide me good details on those things, then I start to do them. And it's like, it kind of rewards the client.
for being like having all their shit together. They know what the task is supposed to include. They know how it should work. Here's a way to do it. And then it allows me to just deliver on it as quickly but accurately as possible. And so that's kind of the model that I'm trying to adopt here. I've had, like, I'm not exactly a marketing expert. So I think getting this in front of the right people and refining the offer is something that I still probably could do better with, right? But ⁓ I've seen,
I had like, I basically had one person already take advantage of this. There was another client who I was going to offer this to, but they ended up going in an hourly direction anyway, which is still something that I do because I'm mainly focused on trying to, you know, find clients that are good fits that I can provide exact value for and not being like a complete stickler on it. But I like the idea of it because it's more about, am I providing you this or more in business value?
versus a certain number of hours. How do you even know how many hours is enough? Like the amount of hours it would take me to do something or you to do something is inherently different because we're not the same person. We don't have the exact same skillset. Even vaguely equivalent skillsets you don't really know. And I think most of us who've ever quoted hourly work for customers also know these are really just educated guesses. Nobody actually likes hours in the first place. That whole practice is something that was borrowed from like lawyers and doctors and stuff.
Eric Karkovack (04:36)
Yes.
Yeah.
Ian Svoboda (04:45)
Like it's not about that. If you give somebody a simple line item though, and you can say, this is $10,000. Am I getting $10,000 or more worth of value from this? Sure am fam. Then great. Then problem solved. So that's the thing that I'm hoping to accomplish with this. So I'm not just, ⁓ you know, taking forever to do things or people asking, well, how many hours is this? It's just like, is this a thing that we'll be able to do within a month or not?
is kind of a simpler way to look at it, right? Like could we build this whole site within a month? And I'll tell you, breaking this down, this is probably looking at more like two months worth of work or something in change, or maybe this, that, but you know what I mean? You can put it in more like grounded terms than just hours or having to quote up every single project separately.
Eric Karkovack (05:17)
Yeah.