Hey!
This is the Daily Overpass.
My name is Eric, and I make apps.
Now, today let's give some advice to a young software developer starting his company.
Okay so today I want to answer a question that came in from Dino Boudic , on episode
490.
He says "Hey there, not related directly to this video, but I have an important question
for you, for me, and other people in my position.
What would you recommend to a young versatile developer starting their own company?
What to consider and be aware of?
Some tips for pulling clients, arranging business meetings.
I'm in the process of starting a very small company and I'm very nervous and excited all
in the same moment.
Any advice will help.
Also you guys in the community throw some advice and don' be shy".
For those of you guys out there in the community, go ahead and put your advice for Dino in the
comments.
But let me tell you a little about what I think.
I'm sorry if I talked about some of this stuff before but you know, it's kind of important.
First of all Dino, I think it's really good that you're starting.
Right, if you start your company while you're young, you're gonna make mistakes, you're
going to have problems, right, but if you wait until you're older you're still going
to make mistakes, and you're still going to have problems.
So it's better to get those out of the way early.
Right, because experience is experience.
You need to do it to get through those kind of problems.
I'm not like proud of the fact that I started out later in life.
I don't think it's really helped me any.
In fact one of the regrets I have is I wished that I started at least 10 years earlier than
I did, but I didn't.
I don't know if you guys have been in the situation where you find out that your direct
manager or your boss is younger than you.
That's happened once before to me and I wish I could say it didn't bother me, but it did.
I think it's good to start young, and just go through all those mistakes now and do that
kind of problem solving.
So in terms of advice I think there are two bits of advice I would give.
The first one is "Don't be technical about this".
So when we talk about getting clients.
Finding clients might be difficult, but you have to think about your clients the same
way you would think about app users.
Your clients will be coming to your company and they want to feel a certain way, or experience
something the same way.
They're not necessarily looking for somebody who is technical.
If they need that they could just go to upwork and find somebody who knows the skills that
they need.
So you have to think about how you project yourself and your company in the same way
that you would put a gooey on the front end of an application.
So How does it make them feel?
I've talked to software companies where it's just a couple of guys and they act like it.
You know you call them up and they say "hello" when they answer, they don't email you back.
This happens a lot where you email a software company and they don't even bother emailing
you back.
It's terrible.
Right so you have to think about how do you want to project your company to them because
they're going to get a feeling when they work with you and you have to look at it from that
front end.
Almost forget about the fact that you're a software developer.
Think about from the user experience side of things, because your users are going to
be your clients, and how do you want them to feel when they approach your company.
That's the first bit of advice.
The second bit of advice, and you're probably going to mess this up to begin with.
First, because we all do, is "Make sure you charge enough".
Because scope creep is going to be a problem.
In fact every software developer I have ever met has a good scope creep story, because
scope creep is a fact of life.
This is what's going to happen.
You're going to get a client and they're going to come to you and say "Alright I don't have
a lot of money and what I need is a simple so it shouldn't cost that much".
And you go okay, what do you need?
And they say basically I just need A, B and C, and you go okay that sounds easy enough
and you think about it . OK A, B and C. I've done that a million times.
It's gonna take me this amount of hours, this amount of hours times my day rate, then you
just charge that.
And you say this will cost this amount of money.
And then they're happy, you're happy.
You go away and you code it and you give to them and they go hmmmm, I notice D's not on
here.
Yeah that's because you didn't say you wanted D. You wanted A,B, and C. And they go well
I thought it was obvious that D would go in there why would I do A,B and C and not do
D. Then you get into this situation where they say I need D. And then you get in the
situation where you either have to tell them you're going to charge more money, or tell
them no, right?
Sometimes when you tell them you need more money, they might get offended by that thinking
you're trying to renegotiate on them and charge more than you initially said you were . But
you're not.
They've moved the goalposts and they're asking for more stuff.
So a better situation to be in, is you have enough margin in your quote so that you can
anticipate a little bit of that scope creep.
So when they say "Hey do you think we could have D?"
You look at it and go yeah I think we could do that.
Now you can't do a lot of extra stuff, but you can do a few little things, you can handle
a few changes here and there, because that's gonna happen.
It happens all the time especially if you're dealing with inexperienced clients.
Those are my 2 bits of advice.
Now I'm sure there's other guys out there that are going to have more advice for you,
and please put that in the comments.
Anyway that is it for today.
I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow.