Blog

I wondered a bit more about freemium pricing models after writing the last post. Freemium is where part of your software as a service is offered for free. Users sign up, they use the application for free but then have to pay for more premium features.

Hubstaff looks fairly typical. They have a free first tier. You sign up, use the free service and then upgrade to one of the paid-for tiers.

Scalable pricing is important because it’s a way of getting more revenue from bigger customers while at the same time you still keep your smaller customers. There can be more profit in the revenue from the customers who pay more, particularly if the cost of customer acquisition is the same for all customers.

There is an EFSA API (application programming interface) that allows you to search live apprenticeship vacancies (in England) and then look at the details of an individual vacancy.

The API is easy to use and there’s good supporting documentation - developing a simple location based search interface is relatively straightforward.

A lot of small businesses start out with MS Excel. They are run on spreadsheets - information about customers, products, quotes and sales spread across multiple workbooks. Valuable data is inconsistent, almost impossible to query and often never backed up.

Sooner or later someone decides to look for a new, more scalable solution. They want a cloud based system that:

• Can be configured or tailored to fit the business.

• Is safe - there’s no risk that it’s going to disappear (with the data).

• Has low ongoing support and hosting costs.

• Is a good long term investment. A platform for future development as the business continues to grow.

This simple interactive dashboard will answer that question. It uses data from the Department for Education’s longitudinal education outcomes dataset. It tracks graduates 1 year, 3 years and 5 years after graduation and includes a breakdown for broad subject area and university.

The design of your software as a service application (SaaS) is inextricably linked to your business model. You should think seriously about how you’re going to find and sign-up paying customers before development starts. Does your SaaS application make customer acquisition as frictionless as possible? How does the design of the application facilitate marketing, customer feedback and the prioritisation of new features?

This is one way to build a very simple Power BI report to track student assessment performance. It illustrates three things:

• The importance of understanding relationships between tables, even in simple reports. Your Power BI model - the tables and the relationships/joins between them - is the foundation of good reports.

• How some simple measures are needed to make the data and the report more useful.

• Why it is important to keep the report as simple as possible - reports with lots of interactivity and multiple themes can be fun to create, but they often confuse users.

Perhaps you’re in the hospitality industry and you want to deliver basic food safety training to new starters. Or you work in social care and you want to put several staff through a Level 2 course in Dementia Awareness.

Elearning is a very viable alternative to traditional face-to-face training.

This is a rough guide to the costs of a bespoke learning management system. Of course it’s a very rough guide, but you get an idea of the possible costs and a starting point for further discussion with a software developer.

Here's how you can use the slicer visualization and a simple measure to filter time based data. The data is basic school attendance data.

There are two tables - Students and StudentAttendance. Not surprisingly, there’s a one to many relationship between them on StudentId. Every student gets two attendance marks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. ‘P’ for present, ‘U’ for unauthorised absence and ‘A’ for authorised absence.