it's an interesting point, could you please go into a bit more detail on how you structure the retainer (certain amount of hours per month)? How many you can stack and so on?
i managed to change a multi year engagement that was billed hourly or by day into a fixed retainer. not knowing what to charge i simply asked the client to tell me what it was worth to him. he chose the amount that i earned with him in the past year. i accepted that, figuring that i would renegotiate if the work got more, or simply not be available for more work than what the retainer was worth to me. what happened in practice was that the work got less. this is circumstantial of course. it happened mainly because we both moved cities and were no longer able to work face-to-face. arguably that made my work more efficient as i no longer had to spend time to travel to the office and i could parallelize multiple things that i was working on. my effective hourly rate ended up being somewhere around $300-500. you can't charge that when billing hourly. i happily would have worked two or three times as much without asking for more.
I've had concurrent retainers, but I'd avoid over-stacking them. Retainers are a liability, you could have multiple clients ask for hours simultaneously, and you'll suddenly be very busy. Weekly retainers are better than monthly because they smooth out the hours.
Personally, I divide my availability into contracts and the more concurrent contracts I have, the more I pad for overhead. So one 40 hr/wk contract vs three 10 hr/wk contracts.
It's possible to stack more, as often retainers aren't fully used, but I think it risks the relationship with clients, which is worth more than over scheduling yourself.
cigarette vending machines are still super common here in Vienna as well. There's always teens hanging around them asking people to swipe their cards to buy the cigarettes in exchange of cash
A bit of history to this - previously there were just machines, you put in cash and get cigarettes - but then it was decided this made it too easy for underage people to buy cigarettes so now you have to use a bank card (I think?) for identification, so young people just hang around the machines and ask a passerby to lend them their card.
Here in Italy you need to use your Codice Fiscale or Carta d'Identità cards (both official documents) as (debit) cards (pre-paid or connected to some bank account) can be obtained as early as 13 or so (of course authorized by parents).
I've had similar experience, also coming from a small Eastern European country. It feels like the market within the country is not big enough, including two nearby countries improves the situation, but you still need to deal with the language differences. To me it just feels there's not enough money, both from the possible customers as well as from investors.
My current employer is originally from the UK, but they started in the US. That included a corp in Delaware alongside the main office in the UK. The product is B2B and it worked quite well in the US, but expanding to European customers in the recent years has been more complex. Luckily since it's a B2B product, the language differences are less pronounced. The product itself is only provided in English and luckily we have European CS colleagues so we can offer support in other languages as well.
I think the main challenge in this space was that in the US there was only 2-3 big players who we partnered with initially. In Europe, each country has 5 of them and each of them work slightly differently. The company never needed outside investment, we kept lean for a very long time and we were profitable very early on.
My recommendation - focus on US, English-speaking customers first. If you can, do B2B and provide excellent customer support. B2B customers have different expectations, but they are also easier to deal with from my experience. If you can, try to bootstrap and become profitable as soon as possible.
Isn't B2B even harder when you have to convince businesses to use your product instead of existing one, so they have to completely move to your product. Then of course attend the meetings with them and so on. I'm not a salesman and for me it would be mission impossible
Maybe it really depends on the industry and the size of your clients. But if you target small/medium business, they won't have crazy enterprise requirements. Of course they will want a good product and something that fits their criteria. But often times they won't need to replace their whole X solution, they just might need a small API/plugin that connects their platform with Y.
I'm not a salesman either, but I think it's easier to persuade 1 business person to spend $400/mo on your solution rather than persuading 100 individuals to pay you $4/mo. Individuals (even I'm like this) tend to have high, almost unreasonable, standards for the quality of service you get for $4 per month. Comparatively I think for a lot of business, $400 a month is nothing.
I'm feeling the same. Two of my teammates are in Ukraine right now. Bosses are now talking about hiring new people to keep up with the workload. And this is the same meeting where my boss said we have a lot of work, but nothing critical. All the systems are running fine, no major bugs recently, the work is purely adding new features.
And they're ready to replace them after ~4 days. It just makes me think we are all absolutely expandable. Hopefully no major crisis happens in my life, cos they'll drop me in a heartbeat :(
Succession planning. Disaster recovery planning. We should have these.
Not having them can lead to hasty, unwise decisions. They should include prioritising tasks and cascades/durations of fall over.
There's not necessarily reason they mean dropping anyone either. Even if exclusively looking at a financial impact there are costs of switching, costs that might be low for a server needing restoring to high for acquiring knowledge specific to your field or product, or a whole lot in between, for example.
Just have a plan. If you don't, be aware of potential for flawed decisions made in haste.
There are both un-smoked and smoked variants, different shapes etc. I think the traditional is the braided one. Definitely recommended if you ever visit Orava/Tatras.
In my mind I knew the hourly rate was a bit lower than what the company would pay a local person, but I didn't expect it to be that much lower. Most of my colleagues are from Eastern Europe, so I think the company is pretty much outsourcing the work and getting it very cheaply.
So thank you for this info, my next job hunt will be different. I'm hoping that with this pandemic, more companies switched over to remote, so it should be easier to find bigger/better paying opportunities. Do you have any tips on good sources for jobs like these? Should I just use linkedin/job boards?
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