Looking back, what mistake helped you most?
What started as a painful story about putting work before family evolved into a quest to understand the impact of mistakes. With that said, please share a mistake you made that later proved to be helpful.
What started as a painful story about putting work before family evolved into a quest to understand the impact of mistakes. With that said, please share a mistake you made that later proved to be helpful.
Easy answer: all of them.
I’ll follow up this weekend with the hard answer.
Awesome
@ToddInsights Ok, apologies for the delay.
The only mistakes that have ever been helpful to me are the ones that I've never repeated again because I learned something from them.
When I first started out as a solopreneur/developer, I was much too eager to get clients so I wound up getting burned by (a) scope creep or (b) a full one half of my invoices not getting paid remotely close to on time, if at all. It took me many projects and months to really get a handle on the fact that even though I was a good relational database developer, I didn't have enough business experience or business sense to really deal with all of the other intricacies involved in being a successful business person. Developing is what I did the least amount of time, with emails, marketing, customer support, maintenance, etc. seriously bogging me down. Here's what I learned from those mistakes:
Don't ever let a client design. Ever
Get paid before you do the work, or release the beta.
Just because you're good at development, does not make you a business person. Experience will make you a solid business person.
Value-based pricing is where it's at.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. That is how you truly learn.
I hope this offers some insight!