It is very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when you are working on something, day in and day out for months or years on end. Sometimes you just need a fresh and experienced set of eyes to give you a new perspective. That is where I can help, with affordable and independent advice on software product development, usability and marketing. My basic one day remote consulting package is to:
- talk to you on the phone about where you are and your objectives (typically 2-3 hours)
- research your product and marketing and write a report outlining what I think you need to do to get to your objectives (i.e. what I would do in your situation)
- discuss the report with you on the phone (typically 30 minutes)
- total duration: 8 hours
- total fee: £500 (+VAT inside the EU) + phone calls[1] – calculate equivalent in USD or EUR
- fee 50% payable in advance and the balance on satisfactory completion – if you aren’t happy, you don’t pay the balance
The report will cover areas such as:
- marketing (positioning, pricing, website, adwords, SEO, PR, affiliates, blogging etc)
- product (platform, installation, functionality, documentation, usability etc)
- financial (ecommerce, currencies etc)
- legal (company, IP, licensing etc)
- anything else I feel is relevant
Where appropriate I may include a screencast with commentary of me navigating your site, downloading your software, installing it, trying to use it and trying to buy it.
Every consultation is different. But the emphasis will always be on actionable items, rather than vague marketing/consultant waffle. All your information will be kept confidential and I am happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Why me?
- I have extensive hands-on experience of many aspects of the software business from over 20 years developing and marketing software.
- I have a strong technical background. I have an honours degree in physics and I am a Chartered Information Technology Professional.
- Through my consulting I have seen what works and what doesn’t at lots of other companies.
- Most importantly, I have been there myself – having built a successful one-man software product company from scratch. Running a small software business is still my main job.
I am happy to work with companies large or small, anywhere in the world, on products at any stage of development. You will need to be able to speak/read English. On-site consulting may be possible in the UK for an additional fee, depending on location. For ethical reasons I probably won’t be able to work with you if I have worked with one of your direct competitors in the last 2 years.
Email me for more details, with no obligation. If I don’t think I can help you, I won’t take your money.
Andy Brice, email: consulting (at) oryxdigital.com
My business partner and I have gone through the final report and are pleased with the breadth and depth of analysis that you did. We’ve sliced the report up into a few dozen actionable TODO items and are starting to work through them. I expect sales will increase as each one is completed.
Doug, www.PowerAdmin.com
Once I’d finished with the major part of Tudumo development, I got to a point where I needed to take stock of the situation. Rather than making every mistake myself, I thought it would be much better to hire Andy to take a look at my application and essentially ask him “if this was yours, what would you do now?”
It turns out that’s exactly what his approach to your business is. We had a couple of phone discussions after which he scoured my approach and website, applying his experience to my situation.
I was left with a six-page action list, which serves me in a number of ways:
1) It validates what I was doing right
2) Points me in some new directions
3) Gives me an actionable set of tasks which serve as a periodic reminder of which tasks will give me most benefit.
4) A few Andy-only tricks that I hope my competitors don’t get!In fact, forget it – big waste of time. ;0)
Richard Watson, www.Tudumo.com
I recently hired Andy Brice to review Schemax Calendar. To make the most of his time (and my money) I gave Andy a summary document of the product covering everything from technical architecture to marketing. We had two highly productive discussions via Skype and Andy provided an excellent report replete with helpful advice and insight. Throughout the experience, and despite an eight hour time difference, Andy was extremely professional. He was a great listener, constructive in his feedback, generous with his wisdom and clear with his recommendations.
Simon Shutter, www.Schemax.com
I launched my product a year ago, but so far haven’t had much luck selling it. I desperately needed advice from a person that could take a look at my situation and help figure out what’s wrong and how to move on. Andy Brice has been through all this and knew exactly what I was struggling with.
Simon Strandgaard, www.GraphicDesignerToolbox.com
Working as a micro-ISV needs lots of different skills, but no-one can have all of them. When you’re developing a software product for your independent venture, it’s easy to lose sight of some issues, just because there are so many of them to cover, and so few hours in a day. I realised that to help me re-focus and prioritise the key tasks after the code was complete needed the catalyst of a fresh pair of eyes, to verify or change the plans I had. Simply chatting to a knowledgeable professional made all the difference to perspective and priorities. I was expecting that from Andy Brice, as I’d read about his work with other micro-ISVs. What I wasn’t expecting was his breadth of business knowledge as well as his technical knowledge. Being able to discuss business objectives, markets, pricing, promotion as well as SEO and coding was a great punctuation point in the development of the Reserviz online service, and it helped me develop a much more focussed set of priorities to complete the initial launch period. Don’t expect from Andy a glib confirmation that everything you’ve done is fine – he’ll give you an honest assessment, and then help you work out a plan. Think of Andy as the Swiss Army Knife you need in your toolbox!
Mike Gorman, www.Reserviz.com
I approached Andy Brice to do some consulting specifically because I wanted to increase sales largely through improving my marketing efforts.
Andy’s approach is one which I think those from a coding background will appreciate. From the first phone call it was clear his process was refined and methodical: not concentrating on fluffy marketing fads but rather on solid proven methods.
Throughout the consulting process it was clear that Andy was taking all the positive and negative marketing knowledge he gained making his own product successful & applying it to create unique recommendations for my own product.
The final report was delivered before the due date & on budget. Reading the report I was stunned by the wealth of information it contained. The report doesn’t just contain dry facts & statistics, the emphasis is clearly on actionable points. Reading Andy’s justifications for making his recommendations it’s clear that implementing them will ratchet up the effectiveness of my marketing efforts one step at a time.
My conclusion is that Andy’s consulting is probably the most cost effective investment I will ever make in my business; I fully expect the expenditure to be repaid many, many times over.
Jonathan Matthews, www.deeptrawl.com
Category Changes post Andy Website Visitors 10% Increase Trial Downloads 200% Increase Google Organic Search Hits 320% Increase Visitor Time Spent on Website 250% Increase What stands out most to me in the above list is that even though our total web traffic has not increased substantially, our overall downloads, conversions, and time spend on the web site have increased significantly. That means that our efforts to focus our advertising and communicate correctly to our target markets is paying off. We’re getting much more qualified leads coming to our web site, they are spending more time looking at the site and the product, and more of them are choosing to download the trial version. (Read the full post here)
Steven, www.zedbuildsandbugs.com
We hired Andy to provide an “outside perspective” on what we were doing. This consisted over an overview of AdWords, our website and a small amount of usability testing of one of our software tools. The results were informative and painful. Painful as in “we knew there were problems, but not like that”. No one likes when they are shown video that proves the user interface is not as easy to use as you thought”. Very humbling. The comments on Adwords have caused us to change our focus in that area.
I’d like to hire Andy for longer, but he has a business to run. I regard the consulting as a success. Its given us a lot more work to do than we anticipated, but I feel that we are more in control as a result. Even if you are happy with your team and their work, an occasional outside perspective is a very useful thing to have.
S K
How can I improve my sales? How can I make my application more profitable? Which of my ideas could be the next software product? With these questions in mind I hired Andy. He evaluated my small business, tested the product, checked the product website/store, and we discussed my strategy. Andy knows the Micro-ISV life and business with all its specialities and constraints. As a result of his work, I’ve now a clear plan and even tools on how to improve my sales. I was already able to put some ideas to work, and they already yielded measurable improvements. And Andy helped me choose my next project, I am now very much looking forward to it.
Ruben Bakker, www.mailplaneapp.com
I launched my product SQL Pretty Printer several years ago, but I wasn’t satisfied with sales. So I contacted Andy to do some consulting about my product and website.
After several rounds of questions, Andy looked at my product and website and did some research. Andy’s final report is easy to read and understand, and lists about 100 actionable points about my product and website. After that, it took me about 3-4 weeks to apply this advice with the help of Andy. 3 months later, I’m really satisfied with the result: the downloads have increased 36%, and the sales increased 25%.
So my conclusion is if you have a product, and want to sell more, Andy is the person you need to approach.
James Wang, www.dpriver.com
[1] I have a Skype number.
