

Ask HN: How did you take your freelance web development biz to the next level? - EMRo

A little more than 3 months ago, I asked HN what the best way was to go about securing RFP&#x27;s and getting bigger clients.<p>In the three months between then and now, I wound up building a substantial (mid 5 figures&#x2F;mo) dev consulting business business focused on single page applications for mobile and desktop. Some of the clients have been large companies (fortune 500) but there are a bunch of smaller nonprofits and smaller companies as well.<p>I would consider this my first successful business and while that makes me warm and fuzzy inside, I&#x27;m running into an issue where my time can only go so far. I have more projects than I can handle as a single person and I&#x27;m going to have to figure out how to either A) scale up or B) say no and accept the cap on my revenue.<p>I&#x27;m hoping some folks here can tell the story of how they took their freelance consulting business and turned it into a full fledged dev shop with employees&#x2F;a process to getting and keeping clients.<p>Specifically, I&#x27;m interested in the following topics:<p>1) When did you know you had to hire your first employee? What triggered it&#x2F;how did you go about doing it&#x2F;making sure your quality remained the same?<p>2) Outsourcing vs. On shore consultants vs. Full time hires? What decision did you make and why?<p>3) What run rate were you at when you decided to staff up, how did you avoid cash flow issues?<p>4) When did you first build a formal system&#x2F;division for sourcing&#x2F;managing clients?<p>I have many more questions but I&#x27;d love to hear your stories and any advice you may have about the process of going from freelancer --&gt; devshop.
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lien
I would avoid off shore developers at all costs. It'll be more costly for your
business if you didn't pick the right ones, or not managing them correctly.

Even if you did pick the right developers, you will have to spend time to
teach them about design. Design is completely off when it's done offsite.

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EMRo
Agreed, I've never had a design come out nicely from offshore. Maybe I worked
with the wrong folks but it has been consistently poor every one of the times
I tried it.

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rmcastil
Is scaling up or accepting a cap on your revenue your only options? How are
you currently billing? Hourly/weekly? Have these rates really been maxed out?

I've been a part of and seen multiple consultancies that have crapped out
because they tried to convert between a single consultant to a devshop too
soon. A big reason is the thought that you can somehow avoid issues with a
good run rate or savings (which is sometimes conservatively advised to have at
least 30K in the bank per new hire). Don't get me wrong, cash will still come
in but you will suddenly find yourself managing the quality/work,
expectations, and livelihood of another person. A good first step is to hire a
on shore consultant (to mitigate the possible communication gap) and see how
that affects your bottom line and overall quality of life.

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tgflynn
I'm afraid I don't have much input on your questions since I'm not there yet.

Since it appears you've had quite some success getting leads I'd like to ask
you a few questions regarding your last HN post:

1) Did ariba work out for you ? If not how did you get the opportunity to bid
on large company RFP's ?

2) What did you have to do to demonstrate that you were a credible supplier
for these clients ? You mentioned having done work as a subcontractor. How
were you able to valorize that work as representative of your own capabilities
? Were these publicly visible projects, even if your name wasn't on them ?

3) Did you have to jump through a lot of administrative hoops to be considered
- ie. DUNS, business insurance requirements, etc. ?

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EMRo
Still not at big co RFP level, a good deal of it is subcontracting.

Ariba didn't work out so well, the projects are usually pretty old and you
find much bigger companies tossing their hat in the ring. I wound up breaking
into big company stuff by working with an agency to start, doing a good job
and then the Tech Director started hooking me up with other Tech
directors/projects to take me to the next level.

Similar to above, the projects were big and public but the key for me was word
of mouth. Every piece of work I did yielded me multiple new clients and repeat
work.

Yep, usually need 500k-1m of general liability insurance. Some require even
more which I don't yet have. I don't have a DUNS number but that hasn't hurt
me yet. You do need to be an LLC or Corp and have your books in order/no
skeletons. One problem is I don't have a long history to point to. Some RFP's
require you to show longevity which I don't have yet.

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steveinator
I too do freelance software development. I'm at a pretty small scale right
now, but shoot me an email if you'd like to talk about doing some work
together in the future. Whether its just passing excess projects off to each
other or it turns into something bigger, I am open to discussion. I am booked
until end of June right now. My email should be in my profile.

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centdev
The easiest thing we did when we needed to scale was to work with a number of
other web dev shops. Some were 1 man operations and others slightly larger.
Not only did this help us grow, but we also made additional revenue when they
passed us work they couldn't handle due to time/experience.

