Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it. Should I charge them?

Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by abhv on Saturday June 25, 2022 @05:11PM (#31878767)

I am a professor in a CS department.

* Easy: ask your dept for a job or RAship to continue to support and build the app and grow its utility. We pay students all the time to build website infra for us in the cs dept. It is usually a ~20$/hr rate, though, so you won't make too much, but it will fund your improvements.

* If you built the app on your own laptop, and you've published the app to the app stores on your own account, you likely own all the rights. Good for you. If the app is hosted in anyway on university resources, then you should be careful if you want to grow this into a business.

* From my own experience, it is very difficult to sell to individual university departments. Much easier to get hired as a consultant. But "enterprise software" that is sold by a license may require the "university procurement" people to get involved. They will went some evidence you'll be around for 3-5yrs, etc...

* Look into how Piazza, Gradescope, Overleaf are doing with university-wide account sales. From what I know, those sales processes are slow and expensive, even though the apps bring enormous value to faculty (e.g., i end up paying for my own single accounts and expensing them against my research budget). Use your network to find someone at those companies to do more research.

Good luck!

btw, happy to try your app and give you feedback

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by jmathai on Saturday June 25, 2022 @06:06PM (#31879124)

I’ve been through the university procurement process. My experience wasn’t too bad. There’s a bit of red tape but the folks who want your solution are probably willing to minimize the process as much as they can (though you’ll still need to complete it).

I would also consider charging for non recurring engineering fees (sort of like consulting).

Instead of $16/mo/user charge a few thousand $s for integration or custom development. Paying for labor is something companies understand very well.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by KyeRussell on Saturday June 25, 2022 @07:25PM (#31879579)

This is the first “boots on the ground” thing I learned being subject to a procurement process: if someone - or the right person - within an org wants your stuff, then you’ll be surprised how many on-paper “requirements” are able to just fall away.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by cldellow on Saturday June 25, 2022 @07:39PM (#31879664)

Or they'll tell you the hidden requirements! I remember selling to a school board back in 2008. We wanted to issue them a bill with one line item: "Software, $100,000."

Luckily, we had a champion inside who took us aside and gently proposed that we repackage it into several line items: site-wide licensing, installation support, training support, 1-year of tech support, custom development fee, etc. It tallied to the same amount, but looked a lot more "normal" for procurement purposes.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by jmathai on Sunday June 26, 2022 @12:16AM (#31881000)

Yup. You have to speak their language.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by euroderf on Sunday June 26, 2022 @11:29AM (#31884871)

I would think that this kind of itemization would also help them in cases where they are trying to detect fraud.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by KhoiUna on Sunday June 26, 2022 @09:40AM (#31883858)

It’s not a big app. I spent like 50+ hours making the app. So charging thousands is out of their budget.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by hazmazlaz on Monday June 27, 2022 @02:48PM (#31898927)

It's not a factor of how long it took you to make it, but the value of it to the end user. If (in a contrived example) it took you 1 hour to create but saved the end user many hundreds of hours of expensive labor, it could be worth a great deal. Think about the output instead of the input when pricing your creation!

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by jmathai on Monday June 27, 2022 @02:01PM (#31898251)

Don't make the mistake of assuming the hours spent is correlated to the amount they will spend.

I'm not saying they will spend thousands of dollars but you might be surprised how big their budgets are and the numbers they are used to.

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Re:Ask HN: Built an app for my university. Faculty loved it.... by tpoacher on Monday June 27, 2022 @12:26PM (#31896863)

some universities have a "developed using university resources" as an IP owning clause.

this means if you coded this at your desk, even if on your "spare time", the university provided resources (the desk) and thus has a claim one your IP.

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