I'm **Bored** and I'm looking to run my own shop
Posted by lefty_is_so_good@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 53 comments
I've been holding down W2 Software Engineering jobs for the last 15 years. I've become really bored with it, and I want to try something new: run my own company.
I know there's lots of literature on the topic, but I've been finding it hard to find resources that aren't just trying to sell me something. I'm hoping to find some friendly advice here.
So, I want to be/run my own software company. I don't have any kind of 'moat' (access to special datasets or whatever) so I don't think buildling/selling a product would be a path to success. I think the best path to making lefty_is_so_good software a success is to find companies that need software built and maintained, and to provide them a great service.
So now my problem isn't one of software engineering, it's one of marketing. How can I find business people and sell software services to them?
Actually, having typed this out, I've answered my own question: "Networking". Go out and talk to people and let them know what I'm doing, and as relationships build, go from there.
loumf@reddit
Make a list of people that already know how valuable you are. Talk to them.
filterDance@reddit
It is okay and even good be sold to, and to sell. You have to fully understand this and embrace it as the first step.
YahenP@reddit
The freelance path is difficult and unpredictable. I can say that very often your first clients are former clients of the company you work for. This is one of the simplest and most obvious ways. Pick up a client when they're leaving, for example, because the company's services were too expensive. You can offer them a 50% discount without any effort, and it will feel like an incredible gift to both parties.
StevenJOwens@reddit
What u/chikamakaleyley describes in their comment used to be a classic pattern, I don't know if it still is, but:
This trend dates back decades, I wonder if Open Source has changed that though, mainly by being an outlet for some of that reusable code.
I think steps 2 and 3 happen so often because selling in general is hard, and selling a general product is hard, but selling consulting services is easier.
I suspect selling consulting services is probably easier because non-technical people/companies tend to focus more on relationships (which they're better at) than on technology (which they're not).
Also, new software products are, well, new, and it can be surprisingly hard for normal people to wrap their heads around that.
I worked on a startup (years ago) that did IVR calls (Interactive Voice Recognition, basically robocalls) to home medical patients to see if they needed new supplies. You'd think "Yeah, it's like a voice menu except it calls you, and the patient can ask for more stuff, and then all you have to do after that is what you already do: ship the stuff and bill the insurance company" would be an easy sell, but damn it took a while.
It was only after we got our 15th customer, a regional level vendor who had a very good rep (for that industry) for understanding technology, that we broke through. After that, every customer basically said, "Yeah, we want what those guys got."
Some of that "hard to wrap their heads around" part is finding the right pricing approach. Pricing is a black art, there are no right answers, and no secret knowledge. In the larger sense, at least in B2B stuff like the above, it's about figuring out which approach is palatable to your particular market. A super simplistic example is buying versus leasing, sometimes one is preferred, sometimes the other (often for tax and depreciation reasons).
In that IVR app, we had a bunch of different knobs and dials that the CEO could fiddle with until he found what that industry liked, fees per patient onboard (importing the patient's data into our system); per month keeping the patient in our system; per call; per order generated, etc. He tried various approaches until he came up with one that felt "natural" to those customer companies.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
That’s a really interesting story, thanks for sharing it!
StevenJOwens@reddit
To be more clear, about the "damn it took a while" part, the vendors were already doing this (calling the patient to check up on them, and also see if they needed more supplies), except with people, only too few, too slowly and failing to keep up. They got the basic idea, and of course everybody by then was familiar with voice menus. The mental stumbling block was more of a paranoia of what you don't know, because you don't understand it. Just think back to the first time you learned about equity/stock/options/etc to put yourself in their shoes. I'm not criticizing them for having these doubts, I'm trying to explain that one of the big obstacles in doing a start up is that you're doing something new, often changing "the way things are done", and this a big mental hurdle to overcome in selling that.
Sakura48@reddit
I’m reading a new book recently about this topic: The E-Myth Revisited. Really made my mind blown.
dmcassel72@reddit
I'll second this. The book lays out that succeeding in business requires more than being good at something (though you need this too, of course). I've been in business for 7+ years and can attest that doing the work (the technician part as described in the book) is the easy part.
chikamakaleyley@reddit
i think this is worth mentioning - if not obvious
what i'm reading is NOT a software company. It's a service, as a software engineering consultant
usually you're building on the dime of your client, they will make part of the contract agreement that it becomes their intellectual property
that's technically what you do for anything that you create as a w2 employee
when i hear 'software company' it does in fact make me think you have built a product to sell to a customer. I think the difficult part there, is convincing someone why they need that product.
chikamakaleyley@reddit
and its important to understand the agreement because, the solution you build for your client could blow up, and become the next hottest tech in the industry. You may feel entitled to some amount of equal compensation, but your client might see that differently
LeeroiGreen@reddit
Are you here in the states?
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
Yep, Midwest
LeeroiGreen@reddit
May I DM with an offer
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
For sure, let’s talk!
LeeroiGreen@reddit
I messaged you
dotnetdemonsc@reddit
Hi OP:
I’ve been a hybrid soloing for a good while now. I’m working on my own flagship product but, as others have said, networking is the cornerstone. I networked extensively over the years through recruiters and business owners and that’s how I personally landed most of my contracts. I’m looking to hire a commission only salesperson hopefully in Q4.
It’s a lot of work, and I am fortunate enough to have a day job that is remote and not very involved, but it is nice having new challenges.
Eligriv@reddit
Why would i hire you instead of one of the other hundreds of available contractors, or instead of using AI ?
The most important thing you should do to sell yourself as a contractor is to make sure you're not in competition with juniors and AI. You've got a be a specialist. Clients hire YOU, not a nameless engineer.
So, figure out what you're best at and want to be doing for the next 5 years, and start making yourself know as a specialist in that.
Beware : being a specialist in a specific stack is easy to achieve, but risky and tough to sell.
Some ideas of valuable specialisations : dataviz, accessibility, extreme load/traffic, deep functional knowlegde (like finance or banking or accounting etc)
kokanee-fish@reddit
So you're going freelance? There are postings for software contracts all over the place, and whole recruiting firms that just connect freelancers with businesses.
Effective_Hope_3071@reddit
Approach GCs and get good at understanding large scale construction project needs. They're drowning in bad software selection and have no one at the company who is systems minded enough to integrate it all.
I work in the space and their fucking minds explode when you show them you can automate something like a TeamUp <> ProCore calendar event sync.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
GCs like, general contractors for construction jobs?
Effective_Hope_3071@reddit
Yessir. A lot of them are just now fully adopting digital processes, and their full company solutions are painfully lacking and fragmented.
However the issue with GCs is it is damn near impossible to convince them that "one app that does everything" is a bad idea so they're a client you need to listen to for their business pains but never roll over for them on their implementation requests.
Tasty-Property-434@reddit
Are you charismatic and a people person? How many contacts do you have that would buy something from you?
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I am often told that I am :D
my5cent@reddit
Play some business Sims or something similar to it and see if that's something you want to do.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I think the last business sim game I played would be roller coaster tycoon, and that was dope 😀
big-papito@reddit
Many contractors I know started way early, with their connections for colleges.
I am Ukrainian-born and I always imagine myself working in the US and managing a team there, but the idea of having to get and keep clients just does not appeal to me. The hustle is just too intense to start from scratch.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I get that, yeah. But I think the sales part might go well for me. One of my "Plan B" careers was car salesman. I've flipped a few cars and odds and ends and always had a good time with those kinds of sales. Maybe I can transfer that into getting clients.
TheBigTreezy@reddit
Sounds like you want to run a dev consulting agency. Selling your expertise in building out or helping build out software. Maybe thats where you start?
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
As this conversation has gone on, yeah, that's the direction I want to go.
laueos@reddit
You nailed a core competency: figure out what companies need and pay for. Be aware: the solution is not always more software. 🙃
innovatekit@reddit
You have to become good at sales. Go to business events and introduce yourself. The conversation will naturally follow from there to get customers.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
That sounds like a good idea. Finding business events in my city would be a good way to start training the networking muscle.
innovatekit@reddit
Connected on Linkedin in case you want to chat more
innovatekit@reddit
Yeah i also did cold email for my ai agency and surprisingly i closed a 5 figure contract from it. But really its about being the first person they think of when that problem occurs.
Cause you dont want the best guy to help you want someone who you trust that is capable.
Thats why people stick around with your even if to the worlds smartest person youre not that good.
CodelinesNL@reddit
What kind of product are you selling? I've been an independent contractor and it's a very different business from selling (for example) a SaaS product, or training, or contracting out others.
So first you need to figure out your product.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I’m thinking of contracting more than anything else
CodelinesNL@reddit
Do you have a LinkedIn profile, that's up to date, with a lot of connections? I started in 2018 and by then I already got a lot of recruiters reaching out to me to basically ask me to work in a contracting capacity.
Also these assignments tend to be full time, not really something you do "on the side".
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
Yeah I’ve noticed that, too. Lots of full time/short term jobs out there on LinkedIn
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I should clarify: I’m not planning on quitting my day job and “yolo”-ing it. I plan to “moonlight” until revenue is steady enough to leave my day job amicably and responsibly.
FitzwilliamTDarcy@reddit
You could try converting your existing job into your first client.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
I've read that advice many times in the past! I have such a hard time imagining it working out, though. Would I not come off as 'uppity'?
"Hey I know you're paying me $160k annually, plus insurance, plus PTO, to work here, but that isn't good enough. I want you to pay me less for smaller projects so I can go find other stuff to do too".
FitzwilliamTDarcy@reddit
Well obviously it's tough to judge without knowing a LOT of specifics about your current employer, role, team, boss, etc. And for sure it's all in the presentation, to put it mildly. But in the abstract I can envision a situation where yes, you take less but do the same-ish amount for them while you also build your business with them as anchor client and #1 referral/recommendation source.
But like I said whether that's even possible requires far more than you should share here :)
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
For sure, lol. My employer already knows it’s my long term ambition to be self employed. Positioning my current employer as a customer might be a good idea. It couldn’t be the first customer though, because I’d be leaving my day job without enough self-employment going.
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
Don't do it without a concrete plan about how you are going to sell. What software companies do is transform code into money. Figure out how you're gonna do that first and remember that over half of your org exists for that purpose, not coding.
CodelinesNL@reddit
They solve problems for money. Some of that solving is through code. But writing code itself is not where the value is.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
Right, totally. So I’ll have to find people, learn about their problems, and help them implement solutions.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
Totally. When I think about how to "turn code into money" I have a hard time imagining it. The code is a tool or conduit for some other thing being turned into money. But aren't there people out there doing what I'm describing in my post?
skidmark_zuckerberg@reddit
The hardest part is clients and how you get them. It’s really via your network and continued networking on your behalf. Once you get some under your belt, word of mouth starts to kick in some.
A few years back, an old employer reached out and asked if I would be willing to take on building an application for them that they were being contracted to build for a large client. I built out a proposal and sent it away. I told my friend who was also a coworker at a past job and we were all in on it and figured we could turn into to an agency. My old employer ended up going under and before that, the large client they had significantly scaled back (COVID era) and we were high and dry. This was on the side, and once this fell through I never bothered again.
Tasty-Property-434@reddit
Would say closing is the hardest part. There are endless ways to find contacts.
lefty_is_so_good@reddit (OP)
That's quite similar to what I'm imagining (excep the high and dry part). That's what it's about then, to get clients - just networking and word of mouth.
heart-give@reddit
Build something, get a booth at a conference that is related to your vertical, and see what happens. You’ll learn pretty quickly if it’s useful or not, and will only cost you 5 - 15k
darkhorsehance@reddit
Answer these questions first:
1) Do you have domain expertise? 2) Do you have enough savings to live off of for up to a year or two while you build out the business? 3) Do you have anybody to help you that can answer the same questions above? 4) Are you willing to work without a vacation for a couple of years? 5) Do you have sales, accounting, project management, legal and marketing skills? 6) Are you ambitious and willing to work 60 hours a week?
If the answers above aren’t all yes, then go for it. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it.
duddnddkslsep@reddit
Do not quit your job until you have funding for your little side project