Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s

http://imjustcreative.com/turbo-boost-incoming-freelance/2009/01/22/

by auston • 18 years ago

48 21 18 years ago

patio113• 18 years ago

This is my only grumble with WuFoo; ... the only option up from the ‘free’ is the $9.95. May not seem much, but ...it’s certainly overkill...

It’s not a cheap option by any means

Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)

astrec2• 18 years ago

Some people just don't work well with numbers, whereas if his plan was priced relative to something he valued his perception might change e.g "Double your leads for less than a couple of pints."

patio113• 18 years ago

Right, but then you'd be telling your Serious Business Clients (TM) "Please, don't consider us an important vendor for your business, we're too busy looking for table scraps from unemployed college students who price everything in terms of beer".

If you have to rewrite your web copy to explain why $10 a month is cheap for a revenue-generating B2B application you have made a catastrophic error in your target selection.

h34t6• 18 years ago

All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this himself.

patio113• 18 years ago

That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid-well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.

You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:

1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks

2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice

3) you actually know what a server is

4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"

5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list

Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?

SwellJoe4• 18 years ago

A single form is free at Wufoo. Just sayin'...

jwesley• 18 years ago

Yes, the title is misleading. Simply having a form where none existed before doubled his RFPs. No reason to think there is anything magical about WuFoo forms, although it is a good service.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

Correction

Web Forms Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s

sgk284• 18 years ago

Yes, it's important to note that the only previous way of getting a quote from him was directly contacting him. A lot of people don't want this. Also the forms makes it explicit what his costs are and what he is capable of doing.

rksprst• 18 years ago

I'm surprised anyone submits an RFP with a from that long. I prefer a simple name, email, and message field instead.

tdavis• 18 years ago

He could double them again if he stopped asking for superfluous and lengthy information such as an address just to receive a quote...

h34t6• 18 years ago

I saw a ~7x jump in online enquiries when I added a simple contact form to the bottom of every single page of the e-commerce store I've been building. We went from about 2-3 online enquiries per week to 2-3 per day.

I actually tried to use Wufoo because I like their back end and had heard great things, but for my UI I need to precisely control the form code on my site, and Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers). So, I handle the submission with my own code.

SwellJoe4• 18 years ago

Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers).

I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking (and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that conversation.

h34t6• 18 years ago

If you can find it, do let me know. I was just working on this a couple days ago and looked into it extensively.

The only option they offer which doesn't involve an iframe comes with a warning, "It will NOT submit to our servers. Because of limited resources, we cannot provide any support for helping you connect these files to your backend." (I'd post the URL but it's in a logged-in area of the site).

Wufoo Doubled this guy's number of RFP(Request For Proposal)s

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