November 8, 2017

Success story from student “Leeroy Jenkins”

One of the students in my private mentoring Slack shared a wonderful success story the other day.

He kindly allowed me to share his inspirational story with you, but did ask that I refer to him as “Leeroy Jenkins” (shared unedited, bold mine, :wink: to the WoW fans)

Here is “Leeroy’s” story:

I was brought in by a friend who runs a digital consultancy to meet with one of the largest trucking companies in the nation ($client). Long story short, they have a mobile app that an outside SaaS company ($SaaS) built for them that their drivers use to update the status of various shipment jobs.

$SaaS informed $client that they were going under and that $client would need to start looking for someone else to build their app or that they could buy the app from $SaaS.

I was brought in as the “Lead Developer” to learn about the situation and what we could do to help.

After meeting with them for an hour, I learned:

$client is less-than-happy with the app they have, and would like to overhaul it

This app is used by over 1,000 drivers (and they’re hoping for more)

This app is directly responsible for how $client is able to bill their customers for shipment jobs

This app has helped improve driver retention rates (this is a huge deal because it costs $5k to train a new driver — I learned that $client is spending millions per year because of driver turnover, so any improvement in retention rates saves $client lots of $$$)

Their setup is a mess of both old & new tech, so there’s a ton of risk involved for both parties.

At the end of the meeting, I said “there’s a ton of risk involved for everyone here. I think we should start with a Roadmapping Session so we can clearly define the minimum amount of work necessary to replace the current app and then establish a product roadmap for going forward.”

I went on to explain what a Roadmapping Session was.

They then seemed to nod in agreement.

We sent the proposal ($6k for a 1-2 hour on-site meeting). They accepted, seemingly without hesitation.

I never would have figured out most of the information I listed above if I hadn’t learned how to have a Why Conversation from @jonathanstark, and I certainly wouldn’t be making $5k for a meeting, which also has a very good chance of leading to an extended, multi six-figure job over the 12-18 months.

I would have walked in, wrote what they wanted down in my notebook, gave some price (that was too low) and some timeline (that wasn’t anywhere near correct), and then both parties would have been in deep :poo: 6 months later.

So thanks @jonathanstark! Your work matters. A lot.

Happy to help! Thanks for sharing, Leeroy 👍

Yours,

—J

P.S. Would you like become part of a select community of devs who are escaping the hamster wheel of hourly billing? My mentoring program will give you the support you need to start building your own success stories. Prices are going up $1,000 soon, so now’s the time to join -> https://jonathanstark.com/mentoring