Unironically, my friends who ran up their credit cards to buy Bitcoin during the last recession are rich and secure now because of it. They thank me for turning them onto it.
Unfortunately for me, I followed conventional advice. I saved a cash emergency fund and only allocated ~20% of my investment budget to Bitcoin. The cash inflated away and I have orders of magnitude less Bitcoin than my friends.
Thank you. You make some really good points. Right now, we are able to compete well with others in the "few thousand dollars" price range. Bigger clients don't entertain us(yet) because we are so small and obviously without the track record of handling big projects.
The goal would be to find something that you offer that you can make repeatable. You didn't talk much about the services you offer (other than the fact they are 'dev services'), but some examples for a dev shop might be:
* architecture review
* seo analysis (if you do webdev)
* accessibility survey (if you have the skills/desire)
* disaster recovery audit
All of these are tasks you can put a single price on, that you can turn into a process, and that have value to the customer disassociated from the hours used to deliver it. That means the first one might take longer, but you can start to optimize the process and therefore make more profit.
As far as hosting, if you build applications, you can offer hosting of those applications. Even if you are building on a cloud or PaaS (like firebase or heroku) you can still offer to manage applications over time. This would include doing things like setting up alerting, handling dependency upgrades, and managing the cloud or PaaS provider.
The value to clients when you do this is that they don't have to set up and manage their own hosting. Since you built the application, you probably know how to run it pretty well too. This can be recurring revenue that you don't have to work for, since you can charge a monthly fee.
There are some downsides of offering hosting/managed services. Depending on client needs you may need to carry a pager, which some employees may balk at. When sites are down, it is super stressful. But it can be recurring revenue and you have a ready set list of people to offer it to: anyone you build something for.
Thank you for the advice. Your suggestions on areas to focus on and SEO makes lot sense. I guess we have quite a bit of thinking and planning to do :) Glad that I am asking for advice here
Nope. I can't stand their so-called "tracker software" when they're snooping what you're doing on your screen, etc. So, I started by asking my existing network for referrals. Later, I had some success with clients contacting me via LinkedIn, but referrals work much better, obviously.
You have the upper hand here over me if you're in the U.S. I bet many of your colleagues/past colleagues, maybe even your friends can provide potential referrals if you ask. I was experiencing troubles when I first started doing programming and consulting because English is not my native language (I can write, but I sometimes stutter and slow down when I speak.), and because I live in Russia and it's a major no-no for a client in half of the cases (stereotypes never die).
But I methodically grew my network, and things started to get much better.
Good point! Yes, we have increased our rates but not kept them very high. I guess that's one of the reason potential clients continue to approach us. I think we are at a point where it makes sense to grow our team, but there are these constraints about wages etc as I mentioned in my description. We want to be as thoughtful and smart about hiring as possible. We are currently growing but we want to make sure whatever we do is sustainable in the long term. One option is to partner with other freelancers and sub-contract some stuff and we have done in few instances, but there's additional risk to that approach and probably not very beneficial in the long term
You might be surprised at how many clients continue to approach you even as your rates increase. In fact, there have been many examples in which people in your situation got MORE offers for work as they increased their rates - apparently it can make you appear higher quality ("they must be great if they charge this much!")
That may or may not happen in your case, but it is worth testing - especially because that higher income will make it MUCH MUCH easier to grow your team.
