Many companies are cutting back and delaying new projects after the recent election. As a new solution provider, how do you create a win-win situation for customers who might worry about:

• quality of the solution
• satisfaction with the result
• cost

How can you add value for the customer by reducing risk or cost?

I propose 4 types of customers:

1. Regular customer: straight work for hire.
2. Reference customer: provides a private reference for my work to a potential customer.
3. Sponsor customer: the company is publically promoted as a user of the product.
4. Partner customer: actively promotes the product within their market.

Regular customer

The customer receives a proposal for their project. Engages in discussions regarding the scope of work, pricing, and other details. Once the contract concludes, there is no continued relationship with the client.

On the Roundup Issue Tracker mailing list a user asked for a mechanism to create a reference for the current issue and copy it to the clipboard.

The request was for the reference to look like:

  issue2345: title of issue

In Roundup, object designators like issue2345 are automatically hyperlinked to the corresponding object.

The code I recommended used a button to trigger this operation. It also used the clipboard API. When clicking on the button (or hitting space or return while focused on the button) the reference format above will be copied to the clipboard. Triggering the clipboard API must be done by a user interaction. For example: activating a button. If the browser does not support the clipboard API, a simple alert() is shown.

In addition to copying to the clipboard, the user gets feedback when the text of the button changes to “Reference copied”. Then it resets to the original message after 2 seconds. Since clicking the button multiple times is idempotent, there is no sense in disabling or debouncing the button.