Mike Monteiro - "Fuck you pay me" (PT Br)

There are a lot of things that you need to do to start your own consulting firm. One of those things to do needs to be: * Watch this video: ▶ this video

I manage a 2-person remote design and development team that seems similar to yours. We all got started doing individual freelance work, and then we raised some money as a team to pursue building our own software product. When we ran out of money, we went back to individual freelancing. We decided to actually start a consulting firm when we landed a big client that required combining all of our skills. We still actually operate with individual S-Corps which contract with our consulting firm LLC, which we own equally. Sometimes we still do individual freelance work outside of our firm. You may want to talk to a CPA about the best way to set things up for your particular goals. - Look for projects everywhere. Even if someone is looking for an individual freelancer, there's no harm in presenting yourself as a team and trying to get the gig anyway. - Local, remote, doesn't matter. The quality of the project is what matters most in my experience. Burnout matters even more when your team is small and everyone is relying on getting income from a project. - Definitely reach out to other agencies, particularly local ones. Tell them you can help with overload and custom coding problems they might not have the in-house talent to tackle. - I've never had a mentor/coach, so I can't really say if it's worth it. - You should probably start by doing the outreach yourselves. Try subscribing to some paid curated lead generation services for freelancers/agencies. For a couple hundred dollars a m

I'll attempt to add to this. I might be stating things that are a bit controversial here. 1 thing we are always transparent with users about is how our business model works. 1 of my favorite videos on the internet about this is [1]. We are very much based on closed source for making revenue. This has actually helped with our community a lot. We are basically focused on closed source solutions for specific verticals. The only way to get clients to pay is to make something more efficient or don't open source/core it. For open source companies there is always a trade off of community vs customers. You have to find a hard line and stick to it. Community is great, but most of those people won't want to pay you. You can try to convert them, but that takes a lot of time and isn't the best path to market. We strive to provide a great base line experience to our users, but a few of the things we have found in practice that helps: 1. Features have customer names on them 2. There's a mass of community interest in a specific feature You have to be careful about where time is spent. It's very easy to mistake "users" for "customers". I wish slava and co the best of luck and really appreciate their post mortem. 1 thing we've learned as an infra company is "be as close to the app as possible". In our case the bulk of what we focus on is banking/telco anomaly detection. It's a straight forward revenue making product that can benefit from deep learning. The great thing is we can grow in to oth

It's from: Mike Monteiro - "Fuck you pay me" talk. Here's a link to the relevant bit in the video: ▶ this video I would however, recommend the whole vid.

There's your first problem. You had a shitty contract that isn't paying you for billable hours. If you quit paying me, or on net 30, you will pay for the work I've done. And if you don't, I'll take your ass to court. "Fuck you, pay me." Very relevant video: ▶ this video

Mike Monteiro - "Fuck you pay me" ▶ this video See his comments on contracts, starting generally at 7m 20s Scope creep is included. Renegotiate. It's a new project.

Oh, okay. I guess that makes it all right, then. I would like to suggest watching the following talk by Mike Monteiro: ▶ this video