On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 12:23, Dean Higginbotham wrote: > I think Michael Kimsal has some good questions and points that he brought > up. I'd like to see them addressed too. > > Also, Michael, I went to your website today. I'm creating a product similar > to yours (in ASP) and was wondering if you might share any opinions you may > have on: > --your pricing? how did you come up with it? why do you not put it on your > site, and doesn't that detract from sales (people cannot just stick in their > credit card number and be done with it). Can you say how much you charge?
Funny - we used to have pricing up, but since it's been taken down, we've actually had more inquiries from serious buyers as opposed to window shoppers. Pricing will be going back up after some package/pricing revisions coming soon (see below) Hosting on our servers is $1295 setup and $99/month. "Retail" price is $9995. This will be changing - most likely coming down in price with correspondingly fewer applications and no support. Currently, unlimited phone/email support is included for one year, which many have taken advantage of, but the 'high price' is seen as a barrier to some. > I'm having real issues with deciding how much to charge for my software. > --do you find that people want breadth of products rather than depth of > features? (more products versus each product having more features). See above. > --if you find people don't care so much about features (or, people want more > breadth of products), how do you compete with other software that replicates > the individual systems in your software. For example, I see that you have > discussion forums. If Snitz Forums has fifty features and yours only has 25, > (now, this is harsh I know and I'm not trying to be evil) why would anyone > choose your software over Snitz? Because we're not a discussion forum. If someone wants to try to build an ecommerce system to tie in with the snitz forum system, be my guest. LC is a framework for building applications that share common security elements. If the only thing you need is a discussion forum, don't use our product. We turn away more business than we should, precisely because we're not going to sell something to someone which isn't a decent fit. Short term it hurts, but long term it helps - success rates are higher, customers are more satisfied, etc. The current site doesn't do as good a job of explaining the developer benefits - the system was initially pitched more as a low-end CMS to design shops and end users. It's just very hard to compete there - there's often little immediate payback for customers - especially with customers that are very price conscious. Example benefit: We recently put together a system for someone to allow them to manage user accounts. Those user accounts are registered for one or more reports. These reports used to be faxed out daily/weekly to subscribers, to the tune of at $15k/month in telco costs. We've replaced this with a system for allowing users to come in a download the PDFs they have subscribed to. The PDFs are dynamically watermarked with user info to prevent large-scale replication (making a copy for a friend is OK - making 500 copies and reselling the reports as your own isn't). Piracy has gone down, fax costs are gone, and it took 3 days to put together. It took longer to deal with subscriber issues with how to install Acrobat Reader than it did to put the system together. These are the types of projects LC is more suited to - it's not a discussion forum system, although we currently ship a basic one with the system. Michael Kimsal http://www.logicreate.com 734-480-9961 -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
