Wrapping side projects under a one-person agency?
Hey everyone!
I'm a web developer with a few different open-source packages, video courses, SaaS apps, and YouTube channels that bring in varying amounts of income each month. Everything is currently wrapped up under my full name.
One of my goals I had this year was to start working toward creating a development agency and take on some consulting clients, and figured this would be a good excuse to have an entity to wrap all of my side income up in. Is that the norm for people who have projects spread around like this?
There's also one thing that's a dilemma for me, should I rebrand my GitHub and YouTube channel to match the agency name? Right now, all of my open-source projects and videos are associated with my (fairly unique) name. I feel like moving them over to the agency name could kick-start traffic into it, but it could also drive my current or future followers away who were hoping to have that more personal association.
The alternative would be keep everything where it is, behind the scenes have payments going through the agency name while keeping the videos and packages under my actual name.
I'd love to hear any recommendations or advice, especially if you've ran into similar problems.
This is something that I've built in! I don't think there is any right or wrong way of doing this. It comes down to how you plan on marketing your work.
Do you commonly reference yourself as the person building projects?
Do you use a brand to capture the attention?
I find at the start it can feel a little messy, but having a large umbrella brand helps tell the story that you solve client work but also have a number of entities that roll up to it.
Also helps for scaling in the future!
Yup this is exactly how I've been building stuff for 15+ years!
Having an entity and shared "back office" infrastructure is a nice way to keep things streamlined and it's relatively easy to split things out if they grow to a size or complexity that there's enough risk to want to make it separate. This only really gets complex with partners (literal co-owners)...but working with freelancers and contractors is fine!
Re: branding, it doesn't really matter. In many cases the business entity underlying a product or service doesn't match the name of the product or service by name. It doesn't have to legally, and your audience or customer almost certainly doesn't care. The only issue I've seen is someone not recognizing a credit card charge because of the name on the charge, but even that is customizable separate from the entity name so you've got flexibility there.
I don't know if it's the norm, but it's what I've been doing. It's clearer/easier regarding taxes.
Hi Andrew, You could have an umbrella brand which is name of your development agency. Gradually, whenever you feel right, re-brand the other assets in this company name. Good luck to you.
Kindly let me know if you have anything to be listed on https://www.productstartups.com/ . I will be happy to get it listed.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago