Four months is a short short time, and also a long time. in 120 days we’ve gone from broke, to profitable, to broke again, and then profitable again, and then to like… just surviving again. It’s been wild. But with all experience comes the opportunity to learn and grow. Every loss is a lesson, every weakness is an opportunity. So let’s learn something…

Fast, cheap, good, choose two

You know that thing about quality and timelines and money, and how you can’t have everything? That’s true. We all have constraints. Constraints are good. One thing you need to know is that if things are too cheap, you can’t choose between fast or good, because there’s not enough time to choose anything. The early strategy for Capsule was to sell services very cheap, get a lot of clients to “grease the wheels”, and then raise prices gradually over time. This offered mixed results.

A low price doesn’t lower expectations, it shouldn’t anyways, but it does lower the options available. Offering services for such a low price put us in a situation where we earned too little. Any mistake would be a disaster, any setback, a catastrophe. Was it fantastic to work with so many folks! Yes! With mostly great results, but the chance for a spiral of bad outcomes became too high, and quality suffered.

Returning to the old lesson, to truly excel you need to focus. to focus you need to be doing less things.

Less, but better

The last 4 months of Capsule taught valuable lessons. What I’m capable of, what my regular output is. Also how expensive going outside really is for a family of 6. It’s a lot. Like $50/hour or more. The sunlight will suck you dry. Outside is expensive. Living in survival mode again has clarified our true needs.

The only true resource is time. Everything else is won or lost against the clock. So too, in a service business like Capsule, There are only so many hours in a day. Not charging enough for that time will lead to bankruptcy. Charging too much for that time will lead to no clients. A healthy balance needs to be struck.

The solution, and the only true moat, is to improve the quality of the service we provide, in the same time that we provide it. Selling fewer hours for a higher price. Simple. The path to higher service is to offer less, a fewer number of services. Focus, deliver, and repeat.

To focus, I’m shifting my marketing, and study, to provide design and development solutions for the front end. I’ve made some really great stuff recently and I want to push farther and faster on that front. My mind is stuck in HTML and CSS right now. Sticking around in that space feels like it will make things easier.

I’ll still offer other services. Absolutely. I think a key differentiator that I have is that I have very deep technical knowledge. I can build everything, and be useful in a lot of situations.

Trainwrecks, and their root causes

Other trains.

In this analogy, projects are trains. The track is my time. The wrecks are a manifestation of a mistake in planning.

With so many smaller projects, ideally, it would be easier complete a project, and then move on to the next. But Capsule began as a subscription only service. Scope and limits are avoided to achieve simplicity for the client. Unfortunately this put too much complexity on me to manage so many projects at once, so even small things would slip.

Preventing train wrecks is all about planning. You can’t have more than one train running on a track at a time. Very simple. Thankfully the solution to preventing Train wrecks in Capsule is the same for doing less but better work. Run fewer trains, at different times, and they won’t crash.

Directly this means That I’ve raised my prices somewhat, and I’m more careful with scheduling to prevent train wrecks. Some of my time is just… UnSellable. It’s safety time, Buffer time. Security time. The other moat, or preventative measure is to get better and faster at my job. I feel like I’ve really leveled up this year so this feels easier.

Redesign - Retooling

The Capsule website’s latest redesign is an effort to simplify the visual representation, and to experiment with the technical composition. I still don’t have a showcase section of my work that I’m really satisfied with, but this is a big step in that direction. I rewrote everything from scratch. (With a little help from pico.css). It’s meant to be more simple, streamlined, and easier to change.

I’ve also split my product offering up a bit. Now I have Pro, and Rocket. Pro is the Monthly subscription product that I’ve been offering for a while, Always at a lower price. This higher price is actually sustainable, and will focus on folks that can afford the services that I’m offering. Rocket on the other hand is the more affordable, one-off service that I’m offering. It’s a one time payment, or a limited scope. Branding + Website. The goal is that folks that need something complete and not ongoing can have a fixed price. It still includes unlimited revisions, making the customer happy is priority 1. I’m also limiting the number of Rockets I sell in a month to prevent those train wrecks I’ve been talking about.

I feel like these changes will move us past survival mode, and into thriving mode.

-kow