Firstly, if the price is right, the price is right. And without the confidence to withstand potential pressure, you end up budging.

Secondly, you have to realize that clients are there to negotiate, and your job is to help facilitate this into a mutually beneficial deal. Just because a client asks for a discount, doesn’t mean it is a bad client, nor does it mean the client can’t pay the original amount. Put yourself in the client’s shoes! Wouldn’t you ask?

Thirdly, it is OK to leave a bit of flex room at times, *as long* as it does not harm the project. This is arguably the most important principle – the price has to be right to make the project succeed.

Fourthly, never be desperate. If you find yourself in a situation where you are willing to do whatever it takes, something will go wrong, and it’s time for you to step back, get a job, and try your hands at your own business or entrepreneurship again later.

These days, I don’t take a project unless it pays right, period. Why? [The key term being "RIGHT" not "HIGH"]

1. The project needs to succeed! You can pay your building contractor less than what he needs to build the home, but the your home may collapse. Same concept! And at day’s end, the client just sees whether the project is successful or not; if he paid $1 instead of $100, the impression left is the same.

2. You need a good reference! As I mentioned above. If you charge so little that the project itself fails or cuts corners, well, say good-bye to a good reference. Do not fall in the trap of appeasing your client’s $$ needs, as it helps neither.

3. The venture needs to move! If it is a startup project (not a consulting one let’s say), it has to move fast to succeed. If you ask your investor for so little that you can barely make it progress, well, what is the point anyway? Don’t blow your $$, but charge / request the right amount.

4. The venture needs to make money! Hey, you started the startup to make $$, right? Unless your specific strategy is not to make money for a while, figure out how to make money! Even if it is not to make money – ask yourself why?

For young consultants or entrepreneurs, it is tough to think pricing at times, so the following mental paradigm shifts help

1. The product is valuable. Hey, if your product helps save a company $100K annually, or helps them track their inventory so they don’t lose $500,000, or helps them replace thousands of wasted manhours annually, it is OK to charge based on the value. Now, you can’t just charge based on the value provided if it is a consulting project by manhour, but still, calculate and remind yourself how you are helping your client. If you aren’t helping your client, well, why is he paying you? (maybe he wants to show off his $$, and there’s value in that ]

2. Your hours are valuable. Look- if a project takes you 2 months to build, and it’s either that or a job that pays you 90-120K, do the math. If your client hired you, they would have to pay you and pay for your utilities, office, computer etc. etc. -> upwards of 10K / month. So don’t go in there saying you will charge 10K for 2 months of work because “well, I only need 5K / month to live”. You need to charge as if you are on the job + more since you need to run a business. The client benefits from this relationship because a) he has no in-h0use headaches, b) you bring specific expertise (yourself or through your own subcontractors), and c) the relationship can be cut afterwards cleanly.

3. The client wants it done! I really had trouble with this concept a few years ago. Being a poor student, I always assumed others were in my boat, until I realized some companies have 6 figure expenses monthly or even daily (those big oil & gas guys).

Now… how to price? Will talk about that in the near future

I love mailchimp, but for a client with 100,000+ leads in salesforce and a heavy email marketing focus, the integration is important.

There is another comparison of the systems here : http://www.convertiv.com/comparing-salesforce-integration-for-popular-email-marketing-platforms/

It isn’t like mailchimp cannot be integrated, but it will require some custom coding, which is not always good for the end client. [billable hours!]

Well, hopefully back to track this week after a few days of icing, exercises, DMSO etc. No rush.

There is also no apparent clean all option unlike previous version of XCode.

All you have to do is: press the option key and click on Product menu -> the “Clean” changes to “Clean Build Folder”!

Done

Recently, we had to include Arial Black in our UIWebView for a card viewer application.

Here is how:

1. You drag the *.ttf file into the Resources folder
2. Add a row to the *-info.plist file called “UIAppFonts” (of type Array)
3. It will change to say “Fonts provided by application”
4. Add the full name of the font in the Array – i.e. “Arial Black.ttf”
5. Now you can use the font in your HTML as you would regularly.

Android requires compiler compliance level 5.0 or 6.0. Found ’1.4′ instead.  Please use Android Tools > Fix Project Properties.

The fix to this is to right click on the project, go to project properties, and under java compiler set it to 1.6 [it may be set to 1.5 or 1.4]

We were able to integrate a wordpress design for them within 24 hours and give them a highly professional look.

The web portal will eventually include other tools the company currently uses but are not centrally accessible – i.e. dispatching contractors is still done on excel spreadsheets.

The reporting services will make it easy for the C-level executives to quickly get a pulse of the company. The money spent so far in just data warehousing has already saved them 6 figures.

More on the technical challenges of this soon.

When you try to go through the Phonegap Tutorial, you will notice that on Step 4 there is no such folder called “www”.

To fix this issue, simply right click on the project itself and click “show in finder” -> there you will see the “WWW” folder along with index.html. Now drag this folder into the XCode project and voila, www is present.