#2 - What we charge—and how many workshops pay the bills Ship the Diff https://shipthediff.com/episodes/002-how-we-make-money/ computerlove.tech needs roughly six to seven workshop days per month to pay the bills. I share what we charge, how the economics work, and why the consulting work may become the engine for an open-source product company. YouTube: https://youtu.be/K_H72ieQNfc Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mfoLQOiFAzRwUnHi7Wqsj Transcript 00:00 Hello everyone and welcome to ship the diff episode number two. 00:06 Yeah, so today I really want to talk about or today I want to talk about how we actually 00:14 like how we make money and actually how much we charge for the products and services that 00:20 we that we provide to our customers. 00:23 And then I also want to talk a bit about how our current activities are playing into the 00:31 future direction for the company, which is if you have listened to the previous episodes 00:39 of ship the diff. 00:41 Our goal is kind of like to, yeah, become a product company more than a consulting company. 00:51 Yeah, so that's kind of like the goal, right? 00:54 So that is the goal for today. 00:57 Yeah, as I talked to as I have also told in the previous episodes of ship the diff, our 01:03 main kind of like in source of income right now is agentic engineering workshops where 01:09 we are working with development teams, software engineering teams, usually, you know, over 01:18 three weeks, one day a week over three weeks, you know, just getting them synchronized, 01:25 getting them up to speed, getting them, they're getting them aligned, you know, on the same 01:30 level, or at least raising the bottom when it comes to using agents for developing software. 01:39 And we are not coming out and telling, you know, this is a silver bullet, you just need 01:45 to kind of like apply it and then just magically do your job right. 01:50 It's not, you know, some magic wand that you just wave and then it fixes everything, right? 01:55 We spend a lot of time actually also because, you know, software engineers tend to have a 02:03 pretty big bullshit like sense or like a radar or something like that. 02:12 And, you know, so it wouldn't work if you just came out and just tried to just paint a super 02:19 problem free picture of using agents for developing software, right? 02:25 Yeah, so we're coming out and saying, OK, this is a very interesting tool and it has really 02:30 become useful during the time that we have during the time that it has been a thing, right? 02:36 And we have taught it. 02:39 And it's at a point now where it's hard to ignore as a software engineer that you're probably 02:46 going to be interested in or show some interest at least or learn how to use agents to do 02:52 your work, right? 02:53 But at the same time, we at least we think that you're not losing your job anytime soon. 02:59 And it's still very important to kind of like not just, you know, outsource the entire 03:06 understanding and thinking to agents. 03:11 So so so that's kind of like the point, right? 03:13 Yeah. 03:14 And we are. 03:16 Yeah. 03:16 So and, you know, I noticed that there's some, you know, many of the the building in public 03:21 startup influencers are kind of like kind of like being a lot that they are having, you 03:29 know, numbers a lot of front, right? 03:30 How much did I earn this month? 03:33 What do I charge for this? 03:34 What do I charge for that? 03:35 How many how much money did I make this year? 03:38 Right? 03:38 So I thought it seems like it's really something that people want to want to kind of like know 03:46 about. 03:47 And it's also and I really and I actually also understand it, right? 03:50 If you are sitting there out there and starting and, you know, wanting to start a business 03:55 and are thinking about it, you know, money is pretty real. 04:00 That's a very kind of like central part of this to actually fuel you being able to run 04:04 this business, right? 04:05 So so I get it. 04:07 And also some of these, you know, for example, when I'm going, I'm going to tell you in a 04:12 minute what we charge for a workshop, kind of like, yeah, one workshop, two workshops, 04:19 three workshops, whatever. 04:21 And that might kind of like sound like much to you, right? 04:26 Because it's, you know, from a private private economics perspective, it seems like a lot. 04:36 But but when you have you have it from a point of view where you actually have to pay your own salary and you you have to pay expenses and run a business and also have not only have money to pay yourself the next month, but also have, you know, money. 04:55 In case you don't get any gigs one month, the picture is kind of like a different right. 05:02 And we also we were starting to to think about getting an office right. 05:06 And we also starting to figure out, you know, what the insurances that we need and a lot of expenses we have, right? 05:14 So so so so the picture is basically different when it comes to that. 05:18 So let me just tell you right here how how much money we make on a workshop. 05:24 So we and, you know, basically our pricing model, right? 05:27 It's on our website, so it's not like not public at all. 05:30 But but but just to kind of like make some content here for the podcast. 05:33 So we have two kind of like modes of workshops, right? 05:37 We have the mode or the version where there are under 40 participants. 05:43 In that case, we we are sending to kind of like two of the co -founders out, right? 05:48 And then we are selling one, two or three days. 05:51 We strongly recommend three days. 05:52 But but some of our customers also just want, you know, one day or two days or whatever. 05:57 So and we also serve that right. 06:00 So for one day, we charge six six thousand two hundred and forty dollars for two days. 06:07 We charge eleven thousand seven hundred dollars. 06:10 And for sixteen days, no, no, for for three days, we charge sixteen three hundred and eighty dollars. 06:17 Yeah. And if there's over 40 participants, 06:22 we are and you know, a max of 70 or 80 or so. 06:27 We're sending all three of us, right? 06:29 And in that case, we're charging nine thousand three hundred and sixty dollars for one day. 06:37 Seventeen thousand one hundred and sixty for two days and two twenty three thousand four hundred for three days. 06:45 Right. So so yeah. 06:46 So that's that's kind of like the picture right now. 06:48 And this might be, you know, we're living in Denmark, you know, and we have some tax level here. 06:58 And and that will kind of like impact how much we need to make in order to pay our own bills. 07:03 Right. So that might be different for you if you lived in some other countries. 07:05 Right. So but yeah. 07:07 So this is the case, you know, and I don't know if this is much or not much or whatever. 07:13 This is basically what we have priced it at in order to make things things make the wheel spin. 07:21 Right. And and yeah, we actually also considered soon to actually raise the prices because we have a great demand coming in. 07:32 So so and yeah. 07:34 And so so so so so so that's kind of like the case. 07:40 Yeah. And what we have kind of like 07:43 calculated is that we need to have about six or seven workshop days in one month to actually pay our bills. 07:53 Right. To to go break even that's about it. 07:58 Yeah. So so so this is basically the economics of computerlove.tech at the moment. 08:03 The thing is also that we at the moment, we do not have a super great 08:10 kind of like in we don't have super great insights into like what is our runway and you know, 08:18 what are what is our expenses versus our income and all of that. 08:23 We of course have some but we could have a way better, better, better insights into that. 08:29 So that's something that we're working on to actually get, you know, some some some very, very clear numbers on what is our runway and kind of like 08:39 just, you know, basic financial numbers that kind of like help us think about how much fuel do we have to run this business. 08:48 And that can kind of like help us inform how aggressive or non aggressive we have to be in sales. 08:57 And you know, yeah, stuff like that. 09:00 And you know, at the moment, we are doing zero sales. 09:03 Everything is inbound, mainly because we have this, you know, LinkedIn presence and podcast. 09:09 Very blessed for that because yeah, that's generally generally the way we like it, right? 09:17 But but if we have that kind of like overview, it helps us to kind of like know and make decisions about like, 09:25 what do we need to do in order to kind of like keep this business alive, right? 09:28 And and also, if we are going to talk a bit about more, yeah, we are going to talk a bit more about, you know, the overall strategy for the business. 09:40 Because we also intend we really want to kind of like break out at least to some extent of this, we're paid by the hours that we are kind of like spending with our customers. 09:53 We want to kind of like be selling software that we can scale more in terms of in terms of in terms of that, right? 10:02 In terms of not, you know, having every dollar we make, depending on the hour we spend on something, right? 10:10 So one of the strategic, the biggest, basically strategic goal of our business right now is to become a recurring revenue business, right? 10:19 The good old SaaS business thing, right? 10:25 Yeah. 10:27 And having a very like, very like clean insight into the financial situation of the company also help us decide, you know, how much time can we actually allocate to investing into product development and and that's that type of activities, right? 10:45 So it's very important to have this financial insight to kind of like have a nice to control, to be able to control the business and yeah, all right. 11:01 Yes. 11:02 And actually, the way we are approaching this is pretty agent first, we have this Hermes agent running in our internal Slack. 11:11 And we are basically the way we're thinking about it is that we need to get, give that the access to the system that it needs. 11:19 We have developed our own booking system. 11:21 We have, you know, an account some accounting software. 11:23 We, yeah, we, we CRM system and all sorts of, you know, type types of systems like that. 11:31 And then we need to give that access to it. 11:34 And then we can ask questions about, okay, what is our runway for the next, you know, year, whatever. 11:40 And then it can basically just pull data and calculate from there. 11:45 Yeah, but we also, of course, also need some dashboard things and everything, right? 11:49 Yes. 11:50 And so that was kind of like it's so six to seven workshops a month is kind of like what we need to, to, to, to stay above. 12:01 It's kind of like pay our bills, right? 12:03 As co -founders. 12:05 Yeah. 12:06 And then to talk about a little bit about the, the, the strategy going forward because we want to become a product company, right? 12:14 And one of the problems that we identified in actually doing that kind of like transformation is that we do not. 12:24 So we have basically a product that we're using internally ourselves and that we're dog fooding and everything. 12:30 But one of the big bottlenecks for us and actually succeeding in, in making this a product that, that we sell to customers is that we do not have any external users on it, right? 12:44 And so, so my initial thought was, okay, why don't we make some freemium version that we can get everyone on and kind of like learn what their needs are and talk to have an excuse to talk to customers and kind of like develop it that way, right? 12:59 To create that feedback loop. 13:03 However, that was kind of like not the strategy, right? 13:06 Because we are very, most of our customers are, and the place where it makes sense to start is actually in, in, in the enterprise space, right? 13:16 It's not, you know, the freemium type of users. 13:19 It's basically, it's basically enterprise customers we have mostly, right? 13:24 And those, they have the problems that we would like to solve, right? 13:30 So that's kind of like a constraint, I guess, or at least a choice. 13:36 And our, our kind of like challenge was that it's not easy to create a freemium model for enterprise, right? 13:44 It's not easy to kind of like, it's actually hard to get into enterprise and, and they are not, you know, they oftentimes they want to kind of like host the software themselves on their own infrastructure. 13:57 And, you know, if you sell to enterprise and you are selling, you know, pretty critical parts of, you know, the internal stack, they will often like require that, that it's not just, you know, just, you know, subscribe online and everything is just running on some server somewhere random, right? 14:20 They want it deployed internally, right? 14:25 And, and that requires, you know, if you want to sell to enterprise, you need to get in there and actually create relations with the, the employees and stuff like that and get to know people and all of that. 14:36 And actually, we have identified that the workshops that we're doing is a pretty great way of doing that, right? 14:43 To actually create these relations both not only to the leaders in enterprise, but also to the team who's actually going to adopt these, these tools, right? 14:51 And the product that we want to sell. 14:54 So that's great, right? 14:55 But, you know, when we have workshops, we're there to actually teach people these things and actually do the team building things that actually help them succeed, right? 15:06 We're not that sell a product and we're not there to kind of like install it. 15:09 And, and, and that's just not the mode that we're in when we're out with our customers, right? 15:18 So, and also, you know, people are not kind of like, we're not positioned currently as a product company. 15:25 We are positioned as a workshop consultancy company in agentic engineering. 15:30 And we're also, we're pretty strongly positioned as that. 15:33 So that's, that's great, right? 15:34 But that's not where we want to be. 15:36 We want to be positioned at something else as something else. 15:40 So we want to kind of like position ourselves this way. 15:43 And we want to get in, we want to interact with users to have real usage and stuff like that, right? 15:50 So, so, so, so this is basically the case. 15:55 And, and so the question was, how do we do that, right? 16:00 This freemium way did not seem like a pretty, pretty great way because it's, it's not really, it could work, right? 16:08 But it's kind of like also a little a detour, right? 16:12 If we have this whole journey where you start with freemium, then upgrade to pro, then to team and then to enterprise, right? 16:18 This is also a valid one. 16:19 And we might explore it, right? 16:22 If we, if we, if we, if we, yeah, we might explore it. 16:31 So kind of like the crux of this is that we, we, we needed feedback from the market on the product that we're building. 16:38 Currently, we're only dog fooding it ourselves, but we need the feedback from the market. 16:43 One way to do that is the freemium model. 16:47 Another way, which we like way more is the open source model, right? 16:52 So the open source model is kind of like a sort of freemium model, right? 16:58 Because you're actually putting some software out there, some genuinely useful software out there for free. 17:03 And then your goal—your product goal— 17:08 One of your product goals, especially here in the beginning, where we're trying to reach product market fit is to actually just make a piece of software that people just really want to use because it solves some problem. 17:20 So gain usage on it, gain, gain usage in terms of, you know, enterprises actually deploying this, like actually trying this out internally and deploying it and getting value from it very quickly, right? 17:32 Because then they might call us and actually say, okay, we really love your open source project and it solves a really real problem we have in scaling agents internally in our enterprise. 17:43 And don't you want to come out and actually install it with us? 17:46 And maybe also would you not, would you like to like kind of like manage it and host it and everything and be available for support? 17:54 And then that's a way to actually get this, this recurrent revenue thing that we are that we are seeking, right? 18:02 So that is basically the and if you, yeah, I don't know what the. 18:10 Actually, I don't know what companies do. 18:12 I have some examples, but I just forgot right now, but there's this is a like well known software product product company model, right? 18:20 So, so, so that's kind of like what we are exploring right now. 18:22 So, so that is basically it. 18:25 And we actually have just agreed and come up with come up and agreed on a name for the product yesterday. 18:34 I'm weirdly, I'm very excited about that because, yeah, I'm just waiting to kind of like be able to gather all of this in a product name and be able to build a website and actually service and a repo and stuff like that. 18:48 And just have something to promote, have some customer journey or user journey to actually optimize for and have this go to market growth hacking clear path in front of you. 19:03 That's kind of like what we have. 19:05 We have pretty well aligned right now and it's basically just waiting for, for some basic stuff to fall into place to release this in a week or two. 19:15 So, yeah, so that's very exciting. 19:17 And I'm definitely going to talk way more about that in the future. 19:21 And that's probably going to be a lot of, you know, the, the main topic on this, this channel going forward because, because, yeah. 19:31 And also just a quick note because right now we're doing workshops and I said that we want to be a product company, but we actually view these workshops as a kind of very vital part of selling this product that we intend to open source and sell. 19:49 Basically, because 19:54 we are really learning a lot when doing these workshops, as I mentioned, we're also creating a lot of, you know, relations and network in enterprise companies —and you can also use that for sales and everything. 20:05 So it's actually a pretty interesting product engine to have these workshops in combination with actually building a product and and and we also, you know, 20:17 a big problem in the space right now when wanting to scale agents in an organization is also adoption, right? 20:24 So it's not, it's not, it's not a bad idea to actually make adoption the adoption part actually us coming out and teaching this and 20:35 yeah, also taking some responsibility and helping with adoption. 20:41 It's not a bad idea at all because that's pretty much what's what's needed at the moment also. 20:47 So that's that's the idea and that's the the the business at the moment. 20:53 Yeah, I really hope that you enjoyed this and 20:59 yeah, this was kind of like the episode number two. 21:03 And I am still, you know, kind of like figuring out what this podcast is going to like the format and, you know, me speaking English also is also a big thing, right? 21:14 Because I'm not used to that as lead, at least, you know, content wise. 21:20 So so I need to kind of like find myself there and figure out what is this, you know, international content thing anyways, right? 21:29 So but I hope you enjoyed it and please, if you have any questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn or in the comment section or anything. 21:37 And then remember to subscribe and yeah, just have a great time and I wish you great luck with your business. 21:46 Bye.