If you have a good online portfolio (a site showing what skills you have, what projects you've done, and your personality) as well as good client facing skills, check out matchist. We built it to help awesome freelance web and mobile devs (in the US only currently) find curated projects.
There is no one size fits all solution...for me personally, I require a mix of social and private time to maximize my productivity. Working from home half the time, and working in the other half tends to be best...For those who want to talk/meet, knowing I'm only there at certain makes them more likely to think twice about prioritizing meeting time. Also, the quiet of home and lack of distractions (no giggling coworkers or visitors to the office) leads to the best writing/thinking.
You just have to know how you work best, and hope your company can support it. If you're a startup, be flexible about optimizing workers' time...
Stella from matchist here. Our whole business is based on the fact that outsourcing development overseas leads to a bad experience (not all the time, but statistically). There are a lot of negatives to outsourcing (cultural issues, time zone differences) that already make a collaborative process like development even more challenging. There are ways to mitigate the negative effects of outsourcing, but they then negate the whole reason to outsource: labor arbitrage. If it's cheaper to hire local, there are good reasons to hire local (domestically). I actually just wrote a post about this on the KissMetrics blog: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/in-house-or-outsource/
I just signed up, but I really don't understand what you are doing. Will you be finding leads and emailing them? Will you just curate lists of potential leads? Either way- it's an interesting CA channel to try. But I think you should make that clearer...If it's wasnt for HN i would never pay up front for a service without seeing any benefit first (esp $800)
Thanks for signing up! We'll see if we can make it clearer on the front page. It's the former -- we'll be finding potential leads, curating the list, and emailing them using a variety of formats to see what works the best.
You'll be cold emailing potential leads? In Europe that would not be legal, you'd have to get email permission through opt-in before sending a mail, except in very particular circumstances. I would think it's the same in the US?
We're seeking both front end and back end professional freelance developers based in NYC to join matchist. We've recently been seeing a lot more demand for devs in NYC and currently have more local projects than local developers. To sign up, please have a link to your portfolio (required) here: http://matchist.com/talent
I came across your site a couple of weeks ago. Just wanted to know if you guys have plans on expanding to other countries any time soon or accepting remote freelancers?
It sounds like you are just great at sales for creative work. If that's the case, perhaps you can make more money doing BD for a dev shop or creative agency? I think the question is what the end goal is: if it's to make a lot of money, you'll have to model out the time, resources, and clients you'll need to make X amount of money and weight that vs the opportunity cost of doing BD for someone else. If it's the autonomy/owning your own business, that's a different set of analyses.
It is definitely a wanting to own my own business thing. I wouldn't say I am great at sales. Actually part of my fear of doing this full time is that I won't be able to generate enough revenue. I really just don't know the correct process to hunting out and getting sales from business's.
This was my main takeaway, freedom doesn't necessarily mean time away from work...it's the freedom to change the direction of your business at any point or not to take on more customers (or even to hire people) or sell the business. It's the feeling of being in control of your destiny (not to be cheesy).
That jibes with my take as well. The "freedom" in being an entrepreneur is the freedom to shape your company, and have more control over your path going forward.
This is a very narrow view of mentorship. Mentorship is incredibly selfish: often the person doing the mentoring gets more out of the conversation than the mentee...case in point. Here, the author was challenged on basic ideas that led him to think more broadly about what he assumed was obvious. This could and often does lead to more creative thinking and applications in his company. As long as he doesn't do this all the time, I think it's silly to assume that a CEO should spend 24/7 working on a company. In fact, it's degenerative, unhealthy, and produces poor results for companies (as many studies show).
Some of the most valuable insights/learnings have happened to me when I'm sharing advice with people. Often, I don't even realize I knew something until I've shared it.
Startups are also built on reciprocity- I'm only here because mentors took time away from their successful companies to help me. Now, I'm helping others.
