ooomf Blog

Getting customers is hard.

Because of the situation with the web today, it’s never been easier to start a business. That’s awesome for entrepreneurs, except it also means there’s more competition for attention.

For instance, there will be more apps submitted to the App Store this week (over 26,000 apps) than there were in the entire App Store for all of 2008.

When there’s so much noise, how do you stick out? One of the most common answers to this question is typically advertising.

But for most companies just starting out, the budget required to make a dent in getting customers through advertising is out of reach because there’s too much competition.

37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson voiced a similar philosophy on promotion that has guided 37signals, one of the most successful software companies today: 

We will never have the resources to outspend a Google or a Microsoft in promoting itself. Instead, 37signals tries to out-teach.

At ooomf, we’ve tried many different things to grow our customer base - from search advertising to ad networks and partnerships. But nothing has proven to be a larger source of quality traffic than creating useful content.

We’ve figured out ways to make content that our audience enjoys, how to use guest blogging to increase the spread of our content, and even incorporate “mini-products” to grow our customer base. 

I’m going to share with you what we’ve learned and how to use content to out-teach your competition and grow your business.

The psychology behind content and why it works

Many marketers know the importance of creating quality content. 

For companies like Buffer, content marketing is their main source of traffic, accounting for over 70 percent of their user growth in their first 6 months.

But how can something as simple as blog posts drive so much growth? Part of the story lies in what happens in our brains when we learn something new.

Traditionally, the thinking has been that tangible rewards - like eating and sleeping - were the types of rewards that caused the release of the neurotransmitter, Dopamine, the brain’s universal signal for pleasure. 

In 2011 however, a landmark study was conducted that found that abstract rewards - like listening to music - could also cause the release of Dopamine.

Another type of abstract reward is learning something new.

What this means is by offering content that helps you learn something new, your brain recognizes this content as rewarding and dopamine levels increase to recall the information.

This release of dopamine also makes you want to seek out more content in the future to repeat these feelings of pleasure.

People want to share practical advice

When you create content that is practically useful, it helps build an audience better than any other type of content.

That’s exactly what a study done by two University of Pennsylvania professors found when they looked at the New York Times most emailed articles. 

The results of the study found that people like sharing content that teaches them something new the most - even more than content that might be surprising or interesting:

Helping someone learn something new increases your chances for your content to spread because practical advice is what people love to share the most. 

Give to get: Reciprocity principle at work

When you receive something useful from someone, you feel an obligation to return the favor.

This is the principle of reciprocity and creating useful content (for free) without an expectation of anything in return falls into this psychological model.

When you write a blog post for instance, your aim is to help hundreds or thousands of people to do something better. 

If you succeed, there’s an opportunity that some of those people may sign up for your service or email list because they want to repay you for the content you created that helped them.

Consistency is king: Why trying to go “viral” with 1 post is not enough

A big part of building an audience over time is consistency.  

To build an audience, one hit piece of content isn’t enough. You need to repeat that quality content on a regular basis.

In fact, results from this survey found that once a blog reaches over 23 posts, there’s a 30 percent increase in lead generation that occurs:

This isn’t to say that if you post more blog posts you will get more traffic. 

What this means is, if you consistently create high quality posts, once you hit around 20 posts, you should see a significant increase in traffic coming from your blog as more of your blog posts get indexed by Google, attracting traffic from search as well as links from other sites.

What’s even better, if you keep delivering quality content, consistency breeds authority and trust, says science:

Someone with [consistency] is viewed as rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound. - Author Robert B. Cialdini, PH.D.

The science of consistency: how to develop the habit of writing

I started off a bit too ambitious when I began writing for our blog. My aim was to write 2-3 articles per week but after the first week, I noticed the quality of the articles weren’t where I wanted them to be.

I realized that my sweet spot for what I could sustain starting out was writing one article per week. 

When I made this change, my focus shifted from worrying about reaching a certain number of articles to focusing on the quality of the content. 

Here’s what I did to help develop the habit of writing regularly:

1. Start by writing one article per week. 

If you think that’s too difficult to sustain, commit to writing an article once every two weeks and once you start feeling more comfortable, then work up to one article per week then two articles per week, etc.

Slowly expand until you’re writing at the target number of articles per week that you want to sustain.

This strategy happens to plays right into the science behind how willpower works. It’s well-supported that willpower is like a muscle, and the growth of it takes time. 

This explains why a diet where you cut out your favorite junk food usually fails in the long-term. 

Starting small makes it much easier to develop a habit.

2. Make it the first thing you do. 

I found that my best and most efficient work would come early in the morning (before 9am) when there are almost no potential distractions.

To help make sure I’m efficient when I’m working on new content, the night before, I leave my laptop on sleep with only the blank text file open with the current draft open. Here’s a shot of my laptop when I open it in the morning:

This minimizes distractions and reminds me that working on this post is what I should be doing first thing in the morning.

It also helps because you’ll start reading your draft and instantly feel the urge to make edits and begin writing.

3. When you write, just write.

It’s hard staring at a blank page and curser, knowing that you’re expected to turn it into a work of art that drives customers to your business.

That’s scary.

A way to change this thought process is to focus on just writing for your first draft and not doing research at the same time. 

What helps me get started, is I layout a text document like this:

title

introduction

main topic 1

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 2

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 3

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

conclusion

I then write my first draft of a title and fill in the “Main 1”, “Main 2”, “Main 3” points that are the most important to cover.

Once you’ve done that, break each main point down into “point, example, point” format.

This format makes it easier to organize your thoughts and just be able to write freely. 

I make notes as I go along where I’d like to adding a supporting source or example that I don’t recall the details of and will look up later.

This way, rather than having to flip back and forth between doing research and writing, you’ll be able to focus simply on capturing your thoughts on the subject matter. 

You can go through and add supporting sources later when you start editing.

But I hate writing!

If you really don’t like writing, it isn’t the only form of content that works. 

You may have seen the “People Are Awesome 2013” YouTube clip:

It was created by a band from the UK named Hadouken. Hadouken cleverly posted their new single as the background music to the YouTube video, which is a compilation of short YouTube clips of people doing awesome things. 

The video now has over 70 million views (number 33 on the YouTube 100) and Hadouken’s single “Levitate,” which was playing in the background, made it into the BillBoard Hot 100 this year.

Experiment with what form of content you think you can stick with over time and start with what type of content you think makes the most sense for you. 

If you hate writing blog posts, try creating short YouTube videos or a Slideshare Presentation instead. Just make sure to focus on sharing useful information for your audience.

When having no audience is an advantage

If you haven’t consistently created useful content before, it may seem like it’s not worth it to start when you have no audience.

For example, it took us 2 months before we got more than 10 retweets on a single article from our blog but those first two months were helpful in establishing our content schedule and learning what type of content resonated the most with our audience.

Something that might help to shift your mindset when you have no audience is to think that you get to create content with no expectations so it’s an opportunity to experiment with the topics you want to cover and you don’t worry so much about the number of views, tweets, or likes. 

Those will come with time and actually might come sooner than you expect.

When Hubspot reviewed the data from over 5,000 online businesses, they found that 85 percent had increased traffic from content creation within 7 months.

This is further proof of the importance of creating content early because it can start to pay off in just a few months.

What topics should you make content about: 4 easy places to find ideas 

When I was just starting out, one of the hardest parts for me was figuring out what to write about. I remember after writing our 10th blog post, I felt there was nothing left to write about.

But, after seeing the type of the content put out on successful blogs run by Buffer and 37 Signals, I realized there were so many other opportunities to write about that would interest our target audience.

Here’s places where I began to look for inspiration on content topics:

1. Experiences at our company or conversations with team members

For example, I wrote about our experiences of launching and getting press coverage and how I learned to overcome my issues with stage fright while founding a company. 

In each of these instances, there was something unique that we experienced that I thought would be practical advice for our audience.

2. Experiences in your life outside of your company

Sometimes there’s things you notice while you’re waiting in line or traveling that relates to a topic you cover on your blog.

For instance, David Heinermeier Hansson at 37signals wrote about his recent experience flying with American Airlines and dealing with their customer service department. He brilliantly related it to how caring organizations should work with customers:

A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends. A rigid business bureaucracy looks to nail every T on policies, procedures, and practices—customers be damned.

3. Articles you retweet or bookmark

If you retweeted or saved an article to read it later, the content of that piece had to have been interesting to you. 

This is a great opportunity to think about how you could add to the conversation around that topic that interests you and perhaps go deeper, share an experience you had, or give your perspective.

4. Emails you send to customers

One of our most popular articles on how to get press, actually started as an email to a customer. 

We turned that email into a blog post and within a few hours it shot to the top of the Startups subreddit, lead to opportunities for guest posting, and it became an article that we often referred to when other customers asked about how to get press.

If there are multiple customers asking you the same question, it could be validation that turning that common question into a blog post topic will perform well.

Bonus: Standing out from the crowd: The “mini-product”

When you make content, the goal is to create value for your audience.

At ooomf, our most favorite thing to do is create useful products. Sometimes, we create “mini-products” which are small websites (usually 1-2 pages) that we think would be useful for our customers.

For instance, this New Year’s Day, we released a campaign called Launch This Year:

We collected all the most useful information about how to go from idea to launching an app in the App Store and put it in one place.

This campaign ended up being covered by VentureBeat, Digital Trends, Lifehacker, and Tech Vibes, and resulted in over 17,000 signups within a week.

**Psst. We’ve got another “mini-product” in the works. Sign up here for an early peak.**

Content doesn’t just have to be a blog post. Creating something useful for your customers is the most important thing to remember, how you do that is up to you.

We want to write about you on ooomf!

Getting customers is tough so we want to help share your story.

Once you’ve completed a project on ooomf, you’ll have the opportunity to be featured in front of our email subscriber base of 15,000+ and our Twitter following of 40,000+. 

We’ll also feature you on ooomf.com, and cover your project on our blog.

Email hi@ooomf.com when you’ve complete a project with a link or image of the work and we’ll take it from there!

If you haven’t completed a project on ooomf yet, submit your project here to connect with thousands of handpicked, first class developers and designers from around the world in less than 48 hours.

Before starting ooomf, I worked as an independent designer and at an agency.

One of the biggest challenges of the entire project process (and where a ton of time was often spent) was putting together an estimate for how much the project should cost.

You need to consider things like budget contraints, what functionalities you need, and then figure out an estimate for the amount of time it will take (including the time to test bugs, design iterations, and minor tweaks).

The estimation process isn’t exactly a science but we wanted to simplify it.

To do this, we’ve now built-in helpful tips as you go through our project submission form:

We also added optional fields to help you plan the important details of your project:

Once you submit your project, you can expect to be in touch directly with one of us within 48 hours.

We love working with you on your listing to ensure it clearly communicates what you’re looking for to help put you in touch with the right professional for your project.

Give it a whirl. Submit your project

Would love to hear if you have any thoughts on this. Email me mikael(at)ooomf.com or leave a note in the comments.

At ooomf, we love to keep things simple.

We don’t want our system to get in the way of helping you find and work with creative professionals.

This often leads to drawing up a feature in all it’s glory and then stripping it down to what is absolutely essential.

When dealing with things like options, this usually means offering fewer alternatives to decrease the number of choices you need to think about.

But, in order to build a useful product, there’s a balance needed between too many choices and not enough.

Keeping payments simple

Our goal for handling payments on ooomf was to make it as seamless as possible, from start to finish.

This is why we cover all transaction fees and offer 24/7 support along the way.

To help make it even more simple, we decided to start with just one way to handle payment:

Once you select an ooomf professional to work with, you transfer the full project budget funds into your ooomf account.

After the project is completed and you approved the results, you can then release the funds to the professional you hired.

When more design is better

After we launched this feature, we ran our own project through ooomf and experienced firsthand how the entire process felt.

We realized that for larger design or development projects, an additional payment choice would be helpful to make the project process go even smoother.

Today, we’re introducing a Split Payment option which adds a milestone payment when the first part of the project is complete:

You can now communicate with your ooomf professional on what the first part of your project should be and once that’s agreed upon, you can transfer 30 percent of the project budget before the work starts for that milestone:

Once that initial milestone is complete, you can then transfer the remaining 70 percent of the project budget into your ooomf account.

This option will benefit the project process because it allows you to put in less of the project budget upfront but at the same time still ensures payment for ooomf professionals upfront for work on the initial milestone.

We believe this will be an important piece to help get projects off to a strong start.

If you prefer to transfer the full project budget, we will continue offering that as a payment option:

We’re excited with the progress so far and we’re looking forward to pushing out more updates soon. We’re always looking to improve and would love to know what you think so far.

If there’s something you think we could be doing better, shoot me an email at mikael(at)ooomf.com or reply in the comments.

Palms sweaty. Heart racing. You know the feeling. Whether it’s five people or fifty, public speaking is a gut-wrenching experience for most of us.

Before co-founding ooomf, I had a huge fear of speaking in public. Any time I had to present something in front of more than a handful of people, my stomach would turn to knots and my throat would get so tight I wouldn’t be able to speak.

The reality is, if you’re planning on presenting pretty much anything in your life (which you most likely will), you’ll need to be able to effectively communicate your ideas in front of at least a few people.

To get over my fear of public speaking, I realized a good place to start would be to understand why I was getting stage fright in the first place.

I thought it would be interesting to share with you my research for how I learned to overcome my fear of public speaking in the last year while founding a company.

What is stage fright really

Sometimes, even weeks before a presentation, I would think, ”What happens if people think I suck or someone thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

As humans, we’re hardwired to worry about our reputation above almost all things. There are primitive parts of your brain that control your reaction to threats on your reputation, making these reactions extremely difficult to control.

These reactions to threats are precisely what Charles Darwin tested when he visited a snake exhibit at a zoo in London. Darwin tried to remain perfectly calm while putting his face as close to the glass as possible in front of a puff ader snake that was ready to strike.

However, every time the snake would lunge toward him, he would grimace and jump backward. Darwin wrote his findings in his diary,

My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

He concluded that his response to fear was an ancient reaction that has not been effected by nuances in modern civilization. This response is know as the “fight or flight” syndrome, a natural process that is designed to protect your body from harm.

What happens in our brain

When you think about negative consequences, a part of your brain, the hypothalamus, activates and triggers the pituitary gland to secrete the hormone ACTH.

This hormone stimulates the Adrenal Glands in your kidneys and results in the release of adrenaline into your blood:

It is at this point in the process when many of us experience the reactions of this process.

Your neck and back muscles contract (forcing your head down and your spine to curve) moving your posture into a slouch. This results in a Low-Power position as your body tries to force itself into the fetal position:

If you try to resist this position by pulling your shoulders back and lifting your head up, your legs and hands shake as the muscles in your body instinctively prepare for an impending attack.

Your blood pressure increases and your digestive system shuts down to maximize efficient delivery of even more nutrients and oxygen to your vital organs. When your digestive system shuts down, this is what leads to the feeling of dry mouth or butterflies.

Even your pupils dilate, which makes it hard to read anything up close (like presenter notes) but improves long range visibility, making you more aware of your audience’s facial expressions.

Your experience of stage fright is also affected by 3 main things:

1. Genes

Genetics play a huge role in how strong your feelings of anxiety are in social situations. For instance, even though John Lennon performed on stage thousands of times, he was known for throwing up before going on stage for his live performances.

Some people are simply genetically wired to feel more scared when performing or speaking in public.

2. Level of task mastery

We’ve all heard the saying, “practice makes perfect.” The main benefit of practice is to increase your familiarity of a given task. As this familiarity increases, feelings of anxiety decrease, and have less of a negative impact on performance.

In other words, the anxiety you feel about speaking in public will be less, the more comfortable you feel with your presentation.

To support these findings, in 1982, a team of psychologists watched pool players play alone or in front of crowd. The study found that:

Stronger pool players sank more shots when performing in front of a crowd, while poor pool players performed worse. Interestingly, the stronger pool players performed even better when people were watching them versus when they were playing alone.

What this means is if you know your presentation inside out, it’s more likely that you’ll give an even better presentation in front of a large audience than when you rehearsed alone or in front of a friend.

3. Stakes

If you’re giving a presentation where your business is on the line or the whole nation is watching you speak, there’s an increased chance that your reputation could be massively damaged if you screw up.

As the stakes increase, there’s a chance your reputation could be completely ruined if you perform poorly, which triggers the release of more adrenaline, and can result in paralyzing fear and anxiety.

We’ve seen the effect of stakes on reputation in online communities as well. For example, many eBay sellers worry about their reputation a ton because it directly effects how much money they make. One piece of negative feedback can ruin an eBay seller’s profile and cause them to lose sales.

In fact, one study found that a good reputation for a seller on eBay added 7.6 percent to the sale price of their items.

Having a good reputation is important to protect but, this also leads to having a fear that one slip-up could ruin your reputation and cause the loss of future opportunities.

How I learned to cure stage fright – a 4-step guide

So now that we know the root causes of why public speaking is scary, here’s what you can do to dramatically improve and overcome your on-stage jitters.

1. Preparation

I’ve been to many conferences where I see speakers organizing slides a few minutes before their talk. That’s not the optimal way to prepare for a quality performance. Would you see a musician learning their song 10 minutes before going on stage to perform it? No way.

This way of preparation is also not fair to your audience who is giving the next 10, 20, or 60 minutes of their attention to you.

When I’m preparing to give a presentation or a talk at a conference, here’s my process:

About a week before, I draw out a storyboard of about 15-20 slides, thinking over the content using stick figures or a few words that I may put on my slides. Here’s one of my storyboards:

Creating this storyboard helps me feel comfortable that I know the major points I want to cover and still leaves me plenty of time to rehearse and perfect slides.

I then layout my talk like this:

introduction

main topic 1

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 2

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 3

point

example (something unique from my experience)

point (with key actionable take away)

conclusion

Formatting your talk in this “point, example, point” format not only helps you visualize your entire presentation but also allows you to think deeply about the subject matter you’re covering so you don’t leave your audience wanting more.

I start by filling in each main topic point first and then skip back to the introduction and finish with the conclusion.

When working on the introduction, I start with a story that covers who I am and why the audience should care about my talk. Tell your audience right away how you are going to help them so they tune in.

I then rehearse each of these individual parts (introduction, main topic 1, main topic 2, etc.) between 5-10 times each.

Once that’s done, I recite the presentation content from start to finish at least 10 times.

This might seem like a lot of preparation but keep in mind, Steve Jobs was known to rehearse for hundreds of hours and prepare weeks in advance for his epic Apple keynote presentations.

2. How to practice like it’s the real thing 

It’s important while preparing your presentation to setup your environment in the same way you plan on giving your actual presentation. This removes unknown variables and requires you to spend less mental energy thinking about details when you’re on stage for the actual presentation.

In 2009, a group of MIT researchers found that when there are many visual stimulants in front of you, only one or two things tend to get activated in the brain, indicating that we’re really only able to focus on one or two items.

You want to get to a point where all you have to focus on is connecting with the audience and enhancing the delivery of your story, rather than worrying about what slide is coming up next or where you need to stand on stage.

When I’m rehearsing, I set up my computer on the same side it will be during the actual presentation, I use the same clicker, and deliver my presentation every time as if it were the real thing.

Another tip to help prepare for unknown variables is to say your presentation in front of someone or at least record yourself to replicate the effect of someone watching you. This will help you feel less anxious when you get up in public, knowing that you’ve already said your presentation in front of at least one person.

3. Breath, stretch, and let it go.

The most nerve-racking part of public speaking for me is always those last few minutes before heading on stage. What I do to combat those feelings is I head into the bathroom, stretch my arms up, and take three deep breaths in and out. Here’show this stretch looks:

This exercise activates the hypothalamus, and sends out hormones to trigger a relaxation response.

In fact, researchers tested a single session of slow breathing on 46 trained musicians and the results of the study found that one session of slow breathing helped control arousal, especially for musicians that had high levels of anxiety.

The feelings associated with stage fright are usually the strongest during the lead-up to the presentation rather than during it, so take a minute to breath and stretch before heading out on stage.

4. After you present, book another speaking engagement right away

If you want to get better at public speaking, you have to do it more. Each time you speak, you will get less nervous and more comfortable.

At first, try to book speaking engagements that have lower stakes. For example, maybe it’s a presentation to your family members about the importance of taking a vacation. Anything to help you rehearse the behavior of getting up and speaking in front of people.

Quick last tip: How to stop saying “ums” and “ahs”

A few “ums” or “ahs” won’t kill your presentation but if they begin to fill every slide transition or each time you pause between points, they can become a distraction.

Training yourself to stop saying “um” or “ah” can be difficult, especially if it’s a part of your everyday speech.

One of the best ways to knock these filler words out of your vocabulary is to use a technique called chunking. Chunking means splitting your presentation up into short burst of words followed by a short break and then continuing on with another short burst of words.

For example, group 1-2 related sentences together followed by a 1-2 second pause, then another 1-2 sentences, and so on. This will help you develop a speaking rhythm, making it easier to avoid filler words.

Public speaking can be scary but it’s a necessary part of almost every career. Hopefully, knowing why stage fright happens and using these tips on how to overcome it will help you own your next presentation.

What other tips do you have for becoming a better public speaker? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

By: Mikael Cho , co-founder of ooomf

Top photo credit: Flickr

This post originally appeared as a guest post on the Buffer blog.

More resources:
Steve Jobs iPhone launch video
Presentation Zen book
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs book

photo: Thomas Leuthard

Many of us have a co-worker, brother, mother, or friend that is looking to create that website of their dreams or maybe even the next Instagram. But sometimes, they need a hand to build it right.

We wanted to do something about this.

As of today, when you refer a friend to ooomf, we’ll hook your pal up with a free project listing and you’ll receive 50 bucks or 3% of the project budget (whichever amount is larger)  when they post and complete their first project.

To make this process as simple as possible, all you have to do is these 2 steps:

1. Tell your friends to submit their project here: http://ooomf.com/projects/add

2. And enter your Twitter handle as the Promo Code.

For example, if my friend Luke is building a website and wants someone to design the most glorious homepage, I’d tell him to go to http://ooomf.com/projects/add and enter mikaelcho as the Promo Code.

Luke will then get his project listed for free and once he connects with a designer and completes his project, I’ll receive 50 bucks or 3% of the project budget (whichever is larger).

You can refer as many friends as you like and you’ll get 50 bucks each time one of them completes their first project.

So if you’re one of those people in Facebook’s 5,000 friends club, you probably won’t need to work for a few years.

Why should you refer your friends to ooomf?

- Ideal for projects too small for a studio/agency to take on

- Access to 1,000+ of the most talented developers, designers, & copywriters in the world

- 98 percent of projects find a match within 24 hours

- Build an awesome product

Get started:

Tweet

(Sorry, there’s no referring yourself ;)

Today we’re officially launching a new ooomf. And I, though usually relegated to the corporate shadows, get the honour of introducing it. The new ooomf is gonna help supa-sweet projects find über-talent. The kind of people that (uncreative) recruiters like to call “ninjas” or “rockstars” or “hired.” There’s a ton to talk about, but you can read all about that on the site. And since I rarely get the spotlight, let’s talk about me.

Nobody loves me.

Oh sure, there’s my mom (who thinks I’m cool) and my friends (who know I’m not) but I’m talkin’ like Sandra Bullock love. Someone who, when I’m not around, will miss my congeniality. (See what I did there? How could no one love me.)

This is not Ms Bullock, but if you squint it kinda almost looks like her. Sorta. Sorry, we don’t have the money for proper photography rights.

Anyway, you’ve heard this story before. Some folks start a company and it takes over everything. And so we taxed and we toiled but all the while a giant hole was forming in my soul. I looked to our customers and hoped they would fill the hole with the cupcakes and rainbows of their adulation. But with the old ooomf, there was little of that. I wasn’t feeling loved.

No one was filling my hole. Ahem.

So we burned down the house and built a new one. And guess what? The love poured in. Like, POURED in. Before we had even officially launched. People with projects found great folks. Great folks found great projects. Our foundation was flooded before we even got the walls up. Hot damn, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Even babies want to eat us up.

We’re just getting started but even Luke, our monotone designer, looked up from Photoshop long enough to tell us he is “stoked.” And while we don’t know exactly what the future will hold, there is one thing we know: we’re either going to crush it or be horribly crushed from above somehow.

Either way, that is not a roll of quarters dimes in my pocket. I’m excited.

You can find Angus on Twitter at @angusw. We apologize for letting him write this post.

Before starting ooomf, most of our founding team worked as independent developers and designers. One of the things we learned early on was the importance of how to setup a project for success, so that it starts and ends smoothly.

The benefit of properly setting up a project is that the resulting product is often much better because the expectations of both client and maker are established clearly and early on, before any work is done.

Typically, a text document often called a Project Proposal (or Project Brief) is one of the core pieces of a successful project and having one from the start is probably the single-most important thing you can do to ensure your project runs smoothly.

It might take you a couple meetings or phone calls to get your Project Proposal right with the professional developer or designer you want to work with, but it will most likely save you time and money.

Why projects go wrong
There are typically two main reasons why projects go wrong:
1. The wrong person was hired for the job
2. The communication of expectations was never talked about before the work was started

We’re going to breakdown exactly what we’ve done in the past from when we were independent web professionals and from our time working with independent developers and designers at ooomf to help make your next project run like a dream.

Hire the right person
It can be very challenging to judge quality work of a developer, designer, or any profession for that matter when you don’t have a lot of experience in that field.

When we need to hire an independent professional on a project at ooomf, here’s an outline of our process of how we review a potential candidate:

1. We look for a personal website or past project examples. Because we often are hiring for web & mobile professionals, an online profile with samples of work is a requirement.

2. Have an experienced professional in the field review their work. For example, if we’re looking to work with a frontend web developer, we have our frontend developer review the code of their past project examples. If you don’t know anyone in the field of the professional you’re looking to work with, feel free to shoot me a message at mikael(at)ooomf.com and we’ll see how we can help.

3. Start off with a small piece of the overall project. Once we’ve found the professional we want to work with, we typically start them off with a piece of the overall project that lasts 1 week or 2 weeks to get feel for what it’s like working together.

This short project is paid by the hour and works well for both parties because if for some reason you end up not wanting to work together, you only lose a week or two and a small portion of your budget rather than potentially losing all your funds on one poor hiring decision.

Create the perfect Project Proposal
The right Project Proposal outlines things like work to be done, the budget, payment, and timeline. Most importantly, it makes it clear what the expectations are upfront from the project owner and independent professional.
   
Here’s an outline of what to include in a Project Proposal:

Project summary
Your project summary should be a short, specific 1-2 sentence summary of your project. For example, if you were going to build a mobile app, your project summary might be “Design and develop an iOS iPhone app”

Project description
Your project description should include:
- A 1-2 sentence pitch about what your app does
- Current project progress (i.e. if you have a prototype built, or any previous work done)
- An idea of how big or small the project is (i.e. how many pages of your website you need designed or developed)

Expected deliverables
Your expected deliverables should be a bullet point list of all the work that you’ll need to get done.

The deliverables are exactly what you want to receive at the end of the project.

For example, if you’re looking to have the homepage of your website designed and developed, your expected deliverable would most likely be an Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator file of the design and the source code.

Timeline
You should discuss the expected timeline for the project with the independent professional you’d like to hire. Coming up with a fair timeline for completed deliverables is a good collaborative process.

It’s important that your project timeline takes into account not just the time to design or develop your project but also time to test the work after it is completed. If this step is missed, it can lead to a ton of headaches, like your website looking like crap on a mobile device. So don’t forget to include this in when estimating your timeline.

Budget
Creating a quality website or mobile app is important for success. Development and design costs have been compared to buying a car, and the costs vary dependent upon how complex of a product you’re looking to have built.

Even apps or websites that seem basic can take 50-100 hours to make from scratch and quality designers/developers typically charge upwards of $60 an hour.

The best way to think about setting a budget for your website and app is to think about your project goal. For example, are you looking to create an app or website that:

- you want to become a full-time business
- doesn’t require day-to-day management
- is just for fun, not for profit

In the end, whether you want to build a full-time business with your project or it’s just something on the side, you have to decide if you want something built right from the start or if you want just something that works. But keep in mind, if you get something built on the cheap, it may be hard to improve on as your product adapts over time.

My opinion is it’s better to have something done right the first time than to have a first version built poorly because it was inexpensive and you have to re-write the code or redesign everything from scratch.

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
- John Wooden

Payment
When handling payment, you can typically choose from one of three options:

1. Pay the full project budget upfront
This puts all the risk on your shoulders and is a less common way to pay, especially for large projects.

2. Pay by milestone
This is more common and can be fair for you and the professional. You define key milestones where payment will occur.

For instance, if your project was designing a mobile app, you could break payment into 3 chunks based on completed tasks:

Payment 1    Design of the app icon
Payment 2    Design of the main screen of the app
Payment 3    Design of all remaining app screens

Each payment should relatively reflect the amount of work done. In the example above, Payment 3 should be more than Payment 2 and Payment 1 because it is requires much more work.

3. Pay upon delivery
The pay upon delivery model puts more risk on the professional and for longer projects can be unfavorable.

We typically go with number 2, the “pay by milestone” option. We think it’s the most fair, and allows for everyone to get a feel for what it’s like working together without too much time or money at stake if something were to go wrong.

Legal
This part of the document can vary quite a bit based on where you’re located or what type of business you are in. The gist of the Legal portion of the Project Proposal is to make it clear how payment will work, what happens if things come up that are outside of the original description of the project or deadlines are missed, and who owns the the work that is created. See the sample project proposal below for more.

Free Sample Project Proposal

The most important thing to remember is to put together your Project Proposal before any work is done and use it as a guide throughout the project.

When you’re planning a project to build a website or mobile app, the best thing you can do to make sure your project goes well is to find the right person for the job and make sure that a clear Project Proposal is laid out on the table before any work is done.

What are your best tips for a successful project? Have you had any experiences working on projects with or without a brief? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic in the comments.

Action items this week:

1. Pick your style.

Do you prefer an animated or realistic style? Read more…

2. Determine if you’re going to hire a pro.

Making a high quality demo video is not easy. If you’d like assistance, take a look at these resources. Read more…

3. Write the first draft of your script.

Try to write your first draft in 15-30 minutes. You can come back and edit later, but this will help you overcome writer’s block. Read more…

4. Grade your script.

Give each sentence in your trailer video a grade. Read more…

5. Draw a storyboard.

Sketch visuals that go along with your script. Read more…

6. Record your script.

Produce the voiceover for your video using a blanket, flashlight, and the VoiceRecord Pro iPhone app. Read more…

7. Design frames of your video. 

Create the look of each frame, illustration, and transition in your video. Read more…

8. Choose your music.

Choose music that fits your video. Read more…

9. Publish your video.

Upload your video to YouTube and Vimeo. Read more…

Earn this skill 

Last week we introduced Marketplace, where we select a few mobile projects to send out in a weekly email to a hand-picked community of mobile pros who are looking to lend a hand.

After the first week, we couldn’t be happier with the results:

• 

500+ mobile & web developers, designers, copywriters signed on (and growing)
• Every approved project received an average of 5 quality leads
• 
4 out 5 leads were received within 2 hours



The Marketplace has picked up so much steam that we’re now accepting web projects as well as mobile.



So, if you’re working on your app, a website, etc. and looking for some help from a quality web/mobile pro, don’t miss out on submitting your project on the Marketplace.



The deadline to submit a project to be considered for the current week’s email is every Thursday at 11PM EST.

Submit your project

Work on projects

Action items this week:

1. Decide if you’re going to hire a mobile developer

Developing a quality app is challenging, so dependent upon your budget and time constraints you may want to consider hiring a pro. Submit your project in less than a minute and get in front of hundreds of talented mobile developers by the weekend. Read more…

2. Open your iOS developer account ($99/year)

Register as an iOS developer so you can publish your app in the App Store. Read more…

3. Learn the basics

With each new device, phone or tablet, there are new standards for app makers to follow. Dig in to what is required to make an app for Apple. Read more…

4. Setup your environment

Download Apple Xcode to begin developing your app. Read more…

5. Practice with a tutorial

Understanding how to code a native mobile app is challenging. Practicing with a tutorial can help you learn by doing. Read more…

6. Build your app

Making a quality app is hard. Use the resources below to help guide you through the process. Read more…

Earn this skill