I work as a senior frontend developer in a company and have experience with backend stuff and devops, learning new things constantly. My colleague and friend is the team lead of our team at that company (10 members in the frontend department). Before working in the company I had a long successful path as a 100% remote freelancer (7 years of work).
The stuff we now work on in the company is quite complex - a realtime trading platform with tons of inner components, complex logic, large codebase. To me seems like we got quite experienced and gained precious expertise by the moment. We have the ability to extend our expertise to other fields as well.
Now I feel like my career path now is to establish something on my own and work on a product.
I talked to my colleague about his will to join me as a partner in growing our own business and it looks like we are on more or less the same page about what we want and should do.
Here is my plan:
1. Do preliminary research. Prepare the basement in form of a site with portfolio, our focus, expertise and articles.
2. Start looking for projects online to work on for companies as a contractor team. I will bring us some coins for the first time.
3. Setup the business processes and make the workflow stable and profitable.
4. Keep working as a team for clients and start working on our product ideas.
5. Switch from contract work to our products gradually.
Here are my questions:
- Willing to find projects for a small team (2-4 members) of developers/designers should I look for larger projects in a different way?
- How do I identify that a company might be in need of a team like ours? I don’t want to spam everybody trying to catch a project.
- Should I prioritize our online sales channels over local ones?
- Should I partner up with firms like ours? Contact them and show our offer so that they could be interested in subcontracting with us?
- Should we have mentors/coaches?
- Should I hire a salesperson to look for projects?
Sales/Selling is the last thing on your list and salesperson is only a maybe. Reverse all of your priorities because selling and relationships are the most difficult things to master for a consulting company and you will die without those skills.
In consulting, tech talent < sales/relationship talent. In fact, if you're great at the latter go ahead and get started now because there are lots of great tech people who don't want to do it and will come work for you on a nice contract rate.
To give you an example of this I once worked with a consultant who was a technical rock star, and another consultant who was supposed to be technical but was actually pretty below average. The below average guy was more successful because he was great when talking with the customers and they loved him. He knew enough to talk through problems at a high level, explained things well, and made them feel comfortable that things we're on the right track. If he didn't know something, no problem, he just went and found someone with the answer.
Besides those soft skills he knew how to set and manage expectations. You may be used to the best results winning, but if you don't manage and then exceed expectations it doesn't matter. People love you when they expect 80 out of 100 and you deliver 88. They will not be happy and often fire you if expecting 100 out of 100 and you deliver 92. You will wonder how you just lost to a competitor who is not "as good" as you.
Even if you have pretty good soft skills, do you want to spend time constantly using them? I thought you liked the tech side? If you like both then great because someone has to spends tons of time doing it to sell, maintain, and expand the work and your success depends on how good they are at it.
For many people this will all be hard to believe, or they think it's exaggerated, or that it's easy to just hire someone to do it. That's fine, I hope you have great success. Drop me a line in a couple years to say how things turned out.