Ask HN: Making money is really hard. Help

It sounds like you start from scratch with each client. Your hours of work, work force & expenses are growing but is your revenue per head growing at the same rate? You could easily have a concerted effort for your team to produce something once & sell it many times. Perhaps a less bespoke product that may appeal to a wider business audience - then you may get clients you can upsell at a later date.

Except for the last one, those are things you can do immediately, without thinking hard, for an investment no larger than a couple hundred words of sales copy.

You must have heard of The Lean Startup and like most people get confused about what a MVP really is. The vision behind building a MVP is to identify the most valuable prospects (that make you money) and to get that to the market earliest.

As soon as the MVP starts generating revenue, any further development requires less out-of-pocket investment because the revenue generated will be substituting the cost. This allows for more breathing room to automate, improve, reduce waste, innovate and grow the product.

The biggest secret regarding business is possibly the concept of perceived value. Perceived value is not about 'faking' value, instead it is about defining it.

Example being, instead of charging $ x per hour for web development; break it up into different tasks and charge accordingly: website design, graphic design, copywriting, SEO, marketing (social media, ppc/ppv), system design, consultation (ex. to determine best path forward), training, support, analytics, business analysis etc.

Once you have defined the tasks involved, you can be honest with your client in terms of your strengths and every task will be judged according to its merits (what defines success?). Most clients would prefer paying a qualified copywriter the same amount (or less) than he would be paying a non-qualified web dev.

Defining what you do will allow you to reduce waste and distribute work more easily on your team.

The real trick behind successful software development/consultation is the focus on building systems instead of services. Systems being defined workflows concerning components and participants, focused on re-use. Because lets be honest, real software design reuse either require building generic systems that allow for all scenarios (or can be extended) or defining interactions and components (ea. a design 'pattern').

Step 1. If you do the same type of job repeatedly, create a "platform" (a bunch of re-usable code). Don't actually spend too much time on this.

Step 2. Create a great marketing section on your site for this platform. Create sales materials. You will be telling clients: our "whatever-we-do-all-the-time platform" will save you tons of time and money.

Step 3. Apart from the normal hourly development cost, you charge clients a licensing fee for the platform too. And: PROFIT.

Now let's be clear: your platform doesn't have to be highly polished. It doesn't need to actually save you development time. It's a sales tool to increase your profitability. Pick something hot, like a "mobile platform" or a "social platform" or something like that. And make some pretty graphs for it.