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Discussion on: I am a software developer with 10+ years experience, and run my own profitable business - AMA!

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imben1109 profile image
Ben

You are the awesome guy whom I really want to ask for. I have few question I want to ask for.

  • How can you find a target client?
  • How can you advertising your business?
  • How can you find your partner? Or do you think partner is important for your business. If so, how do you manage the partner relationship
  • How can you explore your business opportunity?
  • How can you find funding?
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michaelgv profile image
Mike

Sure, finding clients is difficult when starting out. You need to draft proposals, and send them in. I found after a while, if you hand drop them off and happen to speak with the person doing it, you’ll get the contract within a few days.

Advertisement is very targeted over Reddit/Facebook/Google/Bing since we hit a small niche, we have a churn rate of 7% annually, acquisition is 49% of all inquiries, so we stand to make a fairly nice profit - our churn rate is always bugging me however.

I don’t think a partner is important to start, in order to start you need a few things:

  1. A product
  2. A mission for said product
  3. Drive
  4. You have to use your own product

I now have partners for marketing, etc. which we do PPT on for the small stuff. Management is easy, we each control a section and don’t step on each other’s toes, we let that person in N section do it.

Exploring for me was gathering up emails of friends in the tech world, sending them an email asking for feedback, and if they know anyone to pass it along. It worked better than expected initially but does die out fast.

I can’t answer funding per se, I’ve never gotten funding from any VC/angel aside some nominal amounts I’ve repaid. I honestly just reached out over Facebook to VC’s, waiting many months for a reply, called and pitched, and had a little success rate but enough to get the cash I needed.