Competition

It’s a shame that there is no way I will be able to fire up the new business fast enough to be anything but side work.  I was just reviewing the competition, direct or overlapping, that I have bookmarked, and I feel pretty good about it.  I’d intended long ago to do a post poking at what is wrong with their sites or their setups.  Never did do that.  Perhaps I will.

Since I was thinking of throwing together a handout to leave with people in my old office building, I was looking for inspiration as to how to phrase services and pricing, and had in mind to make the flier an “October specials” kind of thing to not get locked in.  Fewer of the places seem to advertise prices than I remember.  Most of the ones that do are ones providing strictly remote packages.  If I can sit at a computer or two and remotely run diagnostics or cleanup tools or start a defrag going on multiple computers in an overlapping timeframe, then of course I can charge extremely little.

There’s one with a web site that I make fun of for playing sounds on load and page transitions, and for having no page titles ("Home" on the main page and “Untitled” on the rest), but that has rates that are probably realistic for on-site home services.  That includes a $39.95 charge for the trip plus a minimum one hour charge, which still comes out to less than all or most major competitors.  There’s one that’s international - huge - that you probably never heard of at all, and which could be almost as much the inspiration for Chuck’s “Nerd Herd” as Geek Squad.  There are all the ones with incomplete sites, broken links, no recent updates, obvious small town-ness, unrealistic whatever, excess emphasis on SEO to the exclusion of content and readability, and so forth.

I guess I was unusual in wanting to be so clear, complete, readable, and open with pricing.  And more unusual than I remembered in wanting to stay almost unrealistically low.  Heck, if it has to be relegated to the side, I should strive for normal pricing.  It’d be stupid to drum up too much work by being cheap, and if I drum up too much work at realistic rates, it’s worthwhile and easier to cope, like by having Deb do dispatch and deploying people besides me.

In the meantime, I figured trying to pull the month special thing on people I already know would start to get the word out while I am fallow and extra work is frankly imperative (to the point of “hey look, we have a tip jar” imperative).  It also allows me to explain things better than just leaving a few business cards on each of fifty desks.

Anyway, I just couldn’t resist muttering bloggily about the state of the competition’s public face after reviewing their sites again.

Posted by on 10/02 at 10:59 PM

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