Having this option makes me think that maybe the author is having a tough time being a capitalist. I've come across quite a few people who are uncomfortable making a profit off of someone else and instead provide the option to give things away so they don't "feel bad".
Great idea, but I get spooked easily. I signed up, figured I'd add GitHub, saw "This application will be able to delete any repository to which you have admin rights," and ran away.
Interesting idea. My wife and I joined something similar but specifically for new parents in Seattle called "PEPS" (http://www.peps.org) when we had kids. We got together once a week for twelve weeks. We had a facilitator who loosely guided us in a discussion theme. Of course we all had one big thing in common (kids born within about 3 months of each other), but it was still surprising how well we got along. I've heard similar comments from people in other groups.
So, a few questions...
1. Where are you right now in bringing this to life?
2. What are you finding difficult about getting this launched, and what are you doing to address those challenges?
3. Describe the person who really fits your target audience - what defines them as a group?
Consider an insurance agent who sells to small businesses. They have zero software people in-house and perhaps 1.5 people who do marketing.
You tell those people "Write about the businesses you work with. Write about the kind or risks they have... Do the work upfront on education and you will be the obvious place to buy it from."
This works. Very well.
It works very well, if you can get the insurance agent to follow your instructions. In my experience (I co-founded agentmethods.com, which is roughly "Hubspot for insurance agents"), the best insurance agents often aren't the best writers and frankly don't want to do the work.
In a world where everyone wants the results but nobody wants to do the work, you quickly find snake oil sales people showing up selling the promise of no-work instant results. We've all come across those sleazy SEO firms promising first page rankings for a phrase nobody searches for. I'm not saying that Hubspot is that firm, but it is the world they play in.
There's another type of hybridized consultancy/product business to consider: have a product and provide value-added consulting around the product. This tends to work best with B2B products that require implementation legwork, customization, or just general thought on the customer side to get maximum value.
For example, at Guidearama.com, our platform lets businesses turn marketing assets (videos, white papers, case studies, etc.) into a resource center on their website with lead generating landing pages. We've often ended up managing the entire program our clients are implementing around our platform. This can be packaged at a fixed cost and is much easier to price based on value than normal time & materials work. To our clients, we look like heroes because we can produce results very quickly using guidearama.com that in their minds should take 10x longer to complete.
There are a few benefits to this hybrid approach:
* The consulting work becomes decommoditized. You gain an unfair advantage because you developed the product the client is interfacing with.
* Your product builds your pipeline for you so you spend less time on sales and marketing.
* Your consulting work becomes more efficient because you can automate many tasks in your product that would otherwise take time if you were doing straight consulting work
In patio11's case, I don't think there wasn't an opportunity to do this because his consulting work and Bingo Card Creator didn't overlap - the case might be different with Appointment Reminder.
"What if he doesn't take the garbage out in the correct manner?"
Funny example. We stayed at a place rented through airbnb last weekend in Tokyo that had a three ring binder containing only a 10 page guide on how to properly sorry the recycling. And even with that, I'm 100% sure we got it wrong.
You mean like last Friday (closed for training) and yesterday (closed for Columbus Day)? Well, one thing I don't do during those days is read hacker news (sorry for the delay getting back to you).
I take full advantage of my flexibility. When the kids are off, I take the day off too. My wife's vacation days are limited & tracked, mine aren't, so I'm the first backup when daycare is closed. Not always the best for work, but I do really enjoy those days. Friday was a blast - I made breakfast for the kids, we hit the park, met my wife for lunch, I sped through some work while the kids napped, and then we had an encore park visit.
Looking back over your list of skills, you cover a lot of different technologies. I think it might be wise to pick something to be known for and run with it. Don't leave it up to your future customers to figure out what they can use you for because they will never figure it out.
I'm a work from home dad. One thing I've learned is that no work gets done when the kids are at home (well, awake and at home). I start work super early and we still send the kids to daycare, but I do have tons of flexibility to be a dad that a regular job wouldn't provide.
I've never worked through elance, but I've hired a lot of people there. In my experience (again, as a hirer), once I find someone good, I stick with them. I've got freelancers that I met on elance years ago that I still work with. Don't know if this is normal, but if it is, I'd focus on building relationships and think of it as a marketing channel as opposed to your long-term revenue stream.
Funny to read that today. Some of the pontificating experts really do look silly. I'm not sure the Google founders had a much clearer grasp of the future, though. Legend has it they had tried to sell the company for $750k a few months before (http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/). It's a pretty mental jump to go from trying to sell the house for $750k to raising $25 million in a matter of months.
My company maintains no hardware (everything is "in the cloud"). No server grade stuff or gaming rigs here - I did a purge of some desktop PCs over the summer.
The closest thing I have is an xbox 360 in a closet. I've got a 4 year old macbook pro in a drawer that I keep as a cold spare, a 3 year old macbook air that gets used about 4 hours a month, and a 2 month old macbook pro that is my bread-and-butter machine.
However, I do know people with basements full of hardware.
Can you be a little more specific about the scope of who "you" is? Startups, small businesses, freelancers, etc. I can answer this question, but I'm not sure I'd be polluting your data or not.
I like the term "playing house". Seems like there are a lot of similar activities. I don't make it to many "startup" type events, but when I do, I always wonder why everyone there is spending so much time hanging out with each other instead of going to the events their customers go to.
I went to Grinnell College in the 90's while Grant Gale was still walking the halls of the physics building. He ran the school's "physics museum" - wish I could go back in time and take another look at his displays.
Bob Noyce's impact on the college was immense. The college's investment in Intel was put under the guidance of Warren Buffet (who was trustee from the late 60's until 2011) where it ballooned into the billions. Noyce also got Steve Jobs to join Grinnell's board in the early 80's.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I'm sorry to hear it didn't go the way you wanted. I'm going to tell my wife about your site - she actively practices yoga and we're about to move, so I'm sure she'll be happy to know about a way to find new yoga teachers.
I also wonder if what you're working on has the potential to ever be a billion dollar company. In the 10 minutes they spent with you, they might have decided that you are two years in on this idea already and married to it so might not be a good fit for them no matter how talented your team is.
I've been working from home for 10 years now and love it. It's not for everybody, though. To add to the points from the article, here are a few things I've learned over the years:
- Your office chair is the most important piece of equipment in your office. You're in contact with it most of the day. Buy a good one and it will last you for years. Buy a bad one and it will give you back problems for years.
- If you can, join a CrossFit (or similar) gym. Not only will you get in great shape, they become a social outlet and because they're time boxed, you're in and out in an hour.
- Whether you like it or not, your spouse/significant other's days off become your days off so plan accordingly.
- Enjoy the flexibility of working from home. While you don't want to plunk down and watch TV when you should be working, you can do things like meet a plumber at your house without taking time off.
- Build in a hard stop at the end of your day so you don't blur lines between the workday and personal time. For me, I have a rule that I never work while the kids are home and awake. My wife texts me when they're leaving daycare and that gives me about 15 minutes to save what I'm working on and shift from work mode to home mode.
We're moving from Seattle to the Tokyo suburbs next month. The time zone shift + foreign country are going to add a new layer of complexity to working from home. At least I get to bring my chair.
The biggest thing we did was remove our dependency to a single IP (this was a unique requirement of our business). We also improved our firewall and upped our managed service level. We're not 100% bullet proof now, but definitely better than we were. I'd be happy to go into more detail offline.
It's worth adding that when we got hit, we were relying on "security through obscurity". I slept well at night because I thought nobody would be interested in DDoS'ing little ol' us when there are plenty of big fish out there to go after.
I'm sure a few of you out there are readying this thinking "too bad for Basecamp, but this will never happen to us because we aren't an interesting target." That's what we thought too...