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Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#101

Post by chrisbennet »

I don't know if these things "blow them away" but I do think they are differentiators:

- I bring homemade cookies to our first meeting and if the client likes them, to subsequent meetings. The first time I did this for purely selfish reasons; I like cookies but I'll eat the whole batch myself unless I get someone else to "take a cholesterol bullet" for me.

- I'm extremely honest and forthcoming. I tell them that it may sound like I'm trying to talk them out of hiring me but what I'm actually trying to do is make sure we're a really good fit. I tell them even the non-flattering data about my capablities or lack thereof i.e. I've told more then one potential client "I can spell 'SQL'" when they tell me they'd like to incorporate a data base in the product they want me to make. (But my wife is an expert and she'll help me out.) I tell them my estimates are usually off by a factor of 4X. You know what is worse than not getting a contract? Getting a contract where you can't make the client happy.

- I tell them that they can probably do the job without me - and I mean it. "Here's how I would do this. ... That part might be tricky, I can't remember off the top of my head but I'll look it up and send you some links on this.. Buy me lunch and you can pick my brains."

- Communicate even when there is no news or it's bad news. "I still haven't received your hardware but I wanted to call so you'd know before you left for the weekend. I'll call the vendor on Monday."

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#104

Post by eb0la »

artpop wrote: post #24

Tableau vizs

DATEPART("weekday",...) is my best friend here. Usually sales, etc. on mondays are similar to other mondays and so on...

Maybe I am overly used to this; but customers are astonished seeing that kind of stuff...

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#105

Post by mercer »

reustle wrote: post #93
mercer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally respond rather negatively to automated emails or chat messages that seem human but are not, and I've been thinking of how I would approach this if I had a company big enough that automatic greetings are 'necessary' (or desirable, at least). Perhaps one solution is to use a clearly non-human company 'avatar' character specifically for some of these interactions? A robot or pet character?

A few saas products do this and I love it. It feels honest.

I rather like Trello's little dog informing me of updates.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#106

Post by croon »

JoachimS wrote: post #38
alltakendamned wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the context in which you do this, you've also just wasted 2 days of billable time. If you know it won't work from the start, you're not providing value to your customer by fake considering it.

Good counterpoint. Obvious errors you should not spend much time on. But providing some references to why is probably better than simply stating "no". And I don't think the parent comment suggested to fake work and bill for work not done. We should always be honest.

I don't think the responder suggested to fake work either, but it's still 2 days wasted and no work done.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#107

Post by SXX »

chrisbennet wrote: post #101

I don't know if these things "blow them away" but I do think they are differentiators: - I bring homemade cookies to our first meeting and if the client likes them, to subsequent meetings. The first time I did this for purely selfish reasons; I like cookies but I'll eat the whole batch myself unless I get someone else to "take a cholesterol bullet" for me. - I'm extremely honest and forthcoming. I tell them that it m…

Looks like a good strategy to find the job you're going to enjoy, but is it working well for you in the long run? Or you just have enough savings at bank to not rush until you find a good position?

Since I wish to find some non-freelance job in future, but requirement of bullshit talk scares me. And few times when I attempted to act similar to what you posted I just bumped into a wall of misunderstanding.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#108

Post by elorant »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #79
elorant wrote: post #62

Build much better UIs than my competition. It's a known issue, we developers rarely take the time to bother with UI and it's a shame because it makes all the difference in the world, especially in web apps. Clients can't tell technical superiority, they can only judge from what they see and if your UI is stellar you'll make selling a lot easier. And you know, judging from the fact that so many of us are afraid of the…

Portfolio, please.

Most of my projects are subscription based SaaS web apps specifically aimed for a local (non-US) market. Showing them wouldn’t do you any good because you’d need an account to view the service and it would attract unwanted attention. Contrary to the prevailing HN mentality, I prefer to fly under the radar.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#109

Post by michaelmior »

raverbashing wrote: post #91
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

tablib[0] is one option for Python. There are quite a few libraries that handle export. Excel files (and other Office) file formats are just zip files containing XML. For a while now, this has been an open standard[1].

[0] https://github.com/kennethreitz/tablib

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#110

Post by Jugurtha »

raverbashing wrote: post #91
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

For Python, there's XlsxWriter[0] (creation of new excel files) and OpenPyXL[1] (creation of new and manipulation of existing files).

[0]: http://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/XlsxWriter

[1]: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/openpyxl

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