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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. There's definitely a need for sales/pipeline tracking tools in small businesses, though I'm not sure the focus on freelancers is quite right.

We're currently using Pipedrive for this, and it's a more mature and slicker product, but that's not to say there isn't room for another player (in fact, there are many!). I'm just not 100% sure that the focus on freelancers is right. Has this been validated with actual freelancers? Are any freelancers on HN willing to come out and say that this is a hair-on-fire problem for them that they'd be willing to pay $7/m for this?

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For me, it's something that would have served me (and I would have paid for) in my freelancing days, and it's something that has been working great for me as a small business owner as I've been using the early builds.

I'm obviously incredibly biased (I'm one of the creators), but I agree small business will be a large potential market in addition to freelancers. There will be some freelancers who won't want to put down $7/month, but most busy freelancers would certainly get $7/month of value out of the service.

Here's my blog post about how Stride came about, which has a bit more: http://blog.strideapp.com/post/18976926872/origin-story

Aha. Reading your blog post, I notice that you developed this for yourself while you were running a web design shop with 3 other people. That counts as small business rather than "freelancer", in my book. If I were you I'd go and furiously hunt down bona fide freelancers (who have no interest in hiring more people) and corner them as to whether they'd find something like this useful.

I don't think the price is an issue - in fact, $7 is too low, if anything - but whether or not this is worth paying for at all, for a freelancer. It's definitely worth it for a web design shop - but then you need to market to those rather than to freelancers, and make sure you build your product for the right market.

Absolutely--I think I was a bit unclear on that. I'm absolutely in the small biz bucket now, but I think my past freelancer self would have paid for it. But you're right, we have some work to do around finding whether our target is freelance and small biz or only one of those.

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

I spend more than $7/month on Highrise (from 37signals) to pretty much do what this does. Highrise doesn't directly support a sales 'pipeline' metaphor so I use tags on customers for each stage ("WarmLead", "ColdLead", "FirstContact"...etc). It's definitely cumbersome to do the pipeline with tags but the contact management and email integration is pretty good.

As a freelancer, I really only use it when seeking out the next contract, which is every few weeks or months. So Highrise is overkill and just slightly too expensive to justify. (But switching to something else never really becomes my top priority.)

One last note: a sales pipeline is useful for many types of relationships... finding customers, hiring employees, getting investors, etc. They all have the same first few steps.

I've been using Highrise for a long time, too, and think it's good at what it does, but the heavy contact focus doesn't fit well with my process. The lack of a real overview is also really limiting factor for me, too. It's really a solving a different problem, I think.

Great point about the pipeline concept being useful for different things. We have one early tester using it to track conference sponsorships.

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