Comment by tomgs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomgs | Hacker News Reader

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I actually do that as a service for companies:

https://syntaxcinema.dev

I think that product tutorials are somewhat of a black art. On the one hand you have:

1. Keeping the flow moving and the video fast-paced and interesting

2. Adding aftereffects and other visual niceties

3. Pointing out the relevant bits with zooms, highlights, etc...

But on a deeper level, you also have questions of:

1. Am I using the right sample app to demonstrate my use case?

2. Is the feature I'm using bulletproof? Do I need to change something in the DOM of the application since that feature is not 100%? Do I need to not show a piece since it's irrelevant? Do I need to speed through or flip over from things while they're running / fetching / compiling / generating etc...?

3. And, maybe most importantly, what is the message I intended to deliver? Is that a product overview? A documentation-oriented video? A demo for a conference or a customer? Who's my audience? Am I speaking to them?

I've been doing videos for a while, and I found that the second part of the problem is actually not as easy as one would assume.

I applaud great YouTubers for that - they cracked how to do walkthroughs of products that are not only technically interesting, but also visually pleasing.

I'm a bit of a video nerd, I guess. I started out way back when doing these little nuggets of absolute terribleness (oh my god the thumbnail) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM7w0mARnn4ytxM6s-0b...

And happy to say I improved a little bit from then :)

(that website's pretty new, comments more than welcome)

At what point in the process do I tell you I read somewhere that lack of pricing on a website sucks so give me a discount?

Some point before we've bargained on the pricing, or after? :-)

Right here in the thread so everyone knows that I offer discounts, clearly! :)

I love everything about this.

Your site looks great. Your service is very needed.

My only advice is to stop apologizing for not offering pricing on your website, both here and on your website. Seriously: cut it out. Go right now and remove those <10 words that imply you have something to explain. It's completely normal to have a conversation about something like this before you commit to building it because if you don't have chemistry, you're not going to take the gig.

What you do is the literal best-case scenario for value based pricing. After having read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" by Blair Enns, some of the comments on this thread feel like mosquitoes trying to get in between your toes.

If you absolutely must, you can say something that alludes pricing that won't get you fired by your board. However, even that is too much word, because what you do only "costs" money until it either a) launches the company or b) keeps a failed company from having spent way, way more.

Okay, maybe I do have a 2nd suggestion. It's not as urgent: consider morphing the 3/5/7 minute "products" into "products" that reflect the typical reason those lengths work eg. "The Product Video", "The Explainer" and "The Demo". Even in this thread, people get hung up on the length instead of the goal of the outcome.

It's much more useful for all parties to think of them not as lengths, but formats.

TL;DR: stop apologizing, consider doubling what you charge

Love this - went ahead and implemented the comments with a few extra niceties.

Thanks brother!

still, give me a ballpark for pricing. is this a $50 thing, $500, or $5,000? how many videos so I get for $50,000?

that looks super neat and I'd love to do those for people. if there was a way to get those kinds of jobs, one-off, I'd give it a try. RIP taskrabbit.

Oh definitely low four figures. Can’t imagine doing it for five figures (maybe I should imagine harder) and for less than that it’s just not an interesting pursuit financially for me (given the amount of work required and how much I think my time is worth).

Low four, so say like $2,000 for a five minute video? Why not list $1,999 for a five minute video on your website? For an open source side project, that's maybe out of reach, for a company, that's peanuts (so they'll readily pay it). Or; how much haggling do you do? It's a very neat product, but how much time do you spend on sales emails to get to a price?

Oh, half the fun is the sales calls. It’s very much something I can delegate off to a person on my team, but this is relatively new and so the volume is not that large yet. I also really enjoy them!

I treat these more as discovery sessions than anything else. It’s also how I’ve landed on the exact pricing points I have - talking to people, especially when early, is a great experience.

There’s also something to be said about showing prices only in calls - people hate it here (or in general), but there is value to showing the price at the end of the call and not at the start. You get to show the thing to the person, get them excited, and then the price point looks a little different.

The trick is tailoring the sales call to the person - if I can convince them that they should keep me around since I provide a good service, they might pay the price.

Also, there are always discounts as the guy above mentioned;)

As an aside, what I normally do is reply to each form submission with a personal video and an overview (albeit a short one) of what I think the project should look like given their demands. I then drop a price and get on a call, if they want to.

Many do! And the ones who don’t still get a taste of how I think like and perhaps want to talk some more about other things - this is a side-business productized service; I mainly contract with technical startup companies to do their GTM.

It’s actually looking like it’d be a pretty decent lead funnel for that too!

Man, going out on my own was a great fucking decision.

Because every project is different.

Because the first person to say a number in a negotiation tends to lose.

Because maybe they aren't selling five minute videos. The point is not ever to create five minutes of video. The point is to clearly explain what a product does, and that process is going to be wildly different depending on whether the product makes any fucking sense. You usually don't know if you're going to be able to work with a client until you talk to them.

If someone is sexy and charming, you'll probably go home with them for free. If someone else is neither sexy nor charming, they better be prepared to put something pretty amazing on the table or you're going to pass.

Oh, I should have 100% said this instead.

Yeah, yeah, scrap what I said - let's go with Pete.

He's hired! :p

All of what Pete says is true. I'm just putting forth that having a ballpark number is useful frame of reference because you don't know how many people aren't calling because they don't want to engage with the unknown so I think you're losing more business than you think. But, it doesn't sound like you're short business in the first place, so what I'm saying isn't relevant.

Can one ever really be long on new business? :)

As the greatest singer in our generation said so succinctly in one of her latest hits:

Yeah, my receipts be lookin' like phone numbers If it ain't money, then wrong number

It's kind of like that for me, if phone numbers were five digits!

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