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Ask IH: How did you find initial contracts to fund your product development?
by
A. Hunter
Ask IH: How did you find initial contracts to fund your product development?
I've been in doing professional software development for 10 years, I had a small web business back then building sites for local companies but shut it down to focus on education, since then I've worked at a couple of companies advancing to Lead/manager roles where I've built up teams and products from scratch and handled both technical architecture, leading core development as well as business development.
Now I'm in a place where I'm really eager to start my own company again and bootstrap a small SaaS to make enough to give myself a decent salary and in the long term employ a small but competent team.
To get this off I need to start making money to fund development and contracting/consulting, I was thinking about aiming for doing 75% contracting the first year and put the rest of the time towards product development. The past 4 years I've been focusing on Python and been doing quite good in that space, speaking at events, conferences, hosting hackathons, etc but I'm also strong in JavaScript and have plenty of experience in other backend/application languages. Looking at the local scene where I live it's mostly Java so getting a Python contract isn't super easy and on paper I have somewhat limited experience in Java, especially since I haven't used it for the past 5 years now. So the most viable route for me at this moment to get my business of the ground is to find remote/semi-remote contracts.
I live in the EU (CET timezone), I have found some postings which only apply to people living in the US or those timezones. However if the company is okay with it I don't really have a problem with working later on the day to ease scheduling of meetings etc. I could spend time earlier in the day on my own products.
This is my favorite way to bootstrap, and there is a LOT of work out there for reliable and professional contract developers. If you're a decent communicator and actually show up/deliver when you say you will, you're already in the top 1%!
I highly, highly, highly recommend immersing yourself in the world of doubleyourfreelancing.com, starting here: https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/category/start-freelancing/
Some of Brennan's advice does include a focus on starting local, but basically everything else applies. Get at it!
Don't spend more than 40% of your savings on building your product. You will need 60% of your savings to market it.
I had a free version (for aaaaages) and that had a good following. I collected contact details for as many users as possible.
Then I pre-sold the new (and not yet made) version to about 20 of those users at a discount rate. Had there been no sales I was prepared to drop it and move on. But there was a lot of interest, and its still going strong today.
This was helpful to me on a project
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c3motcInTen-jGBBwtp_fBntrWq26NdxkPzyt7-W8bY/edit#gid=955843793