21–30 of 64 posts
Not owning the product and lack of creative control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What forms of advertising have you tried if you don't mind me asking? Just online stuff? Effective or not, I've been struggling to think of ways to advertise a small contract development business to enterprises other than adwords and seo.
"enterprises"? of what sort? a particular industry? Networking with people in that industry at their events, perhaps even speaking at those events, would do you a world of good, ime. Find some local networking groups that deal with the industr(y|ies) you target, and start to infiltrate their ranks :) P.S. "low/no cost marketing" is one of the sessions at http://indieconf.com this year :)
People wasting my time with stupid ideas. The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.
Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the…
Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)
Not owning the product and lack of creative control.
Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail. I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and withou…
Or work in blocks of money on account (eg for a $50k job, you have the client send you $10k in advance and when that is near depleted you have them wire you the next $10k, etc)
I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.
When I was on the other side of the table, and an employee working in a dev team that also consisted of contractors, the only reason I didn't quit and demand to be rehired as a contractor on 200% of my salary is because the firm only used contractors for grind work. I knew that all of the work that would be interesting and furthering would be farmed out to the employees out of loyalty.
That's why I created this gem, Big Bucks No Whammies, to automatically generate my invoices from my git commits.
https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies
Here's a sample invoice : https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work. Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)
This is interesting to me. Budget isn't something the conversation leads with?