Go, minimal

The most time consuming task during the first six months (July 2008 - Dec 2008) after forming Simande was writing content for our site.  We wanted to extract this from the goals of the company so we created a wiki to document the following:

Phase I: Provide Services

1. Plan, design and build websites for people.  The final product must:
   • represent the best of our abilities, which means no excuses, no “cheap” projects, everything gets our 100% attention and dedication.
   • be something our mothers’ would be able to figure out how to use.
2. Be direct and honest (no meaningless pseudo marketing/tech speak mumbo jumbo).
3. Carefully determine client expectations before taking on a project, only take it on if we can exceed their expectations.
4. Offer comprehensive monthly maintenance agreements to clients who want us to manage their hosting, updates, mailing lists, support, and provide technical and creative consulting for the future of their site.

How to make money:

• Create boutique creative agency quality designs.
• Produce semantic, standards-compliant, cross-browser compatible HTML/CSS.
• Design effortless and easy-to-use interfaces.
• Program clean, quality code using best practices.
• Provide accurate cost estimates that fairly evaluates our time, yet removes the high management padding and “reputation” fees of huge agencies.

Transition

We will continue to do client work until we’ve saved up enough money to take two months off and concentrate on building our own product.

Phase II: Build a subscription-based web product

1. Take one of the many online services (invoicing, mailing list management, CMS, sending files, etc.) we use ourselves on a daily basis and build our own better version.  Remove any features that we don’t use, improve the speed, simplify the interface, and apply the unique knowledge we gained from working with clients in many different industries to create a superior product.
2. Charge customers a monthly fee for our web-based application.  Use the “free until you are successful model” and offer an easy-to-sign-up, fully-functional version of the product for free, but with a reasonable limit to the number of clients, recipients, or file space you can have before requiring an upgrade to a paid version.

The basic idea is to provide web design and development services, save up enough money to spend two months developing our own product, then support that product as if its was a client.  Rinse, lather, repeat until the revenue from our products can support the company.