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The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating: If you build something cool, pe
by jasonkester 17y ago
The author touched briefly on one thing that's worth noting, but it might have got buried in the article so it bears repeating:
If you build something cool, people will find you and give you consulting work
That's a strategy that has worked for me several times over the years. I mentioned a silly unmonetizable Travel Blogging site elsewhere in this discussion, but if you look at the paying client work that resulted from that site's existence, you could argue that it's been one of my most successful products.
- patio11 17y agoIn addition to cool, I might suggest building something public which comes close to meeting business needs for people. With those provisos: yeah, it works great. Having a reputation in whatever your circle of competence is gets you more leads and lets you be pickier about who you work with, what you work on, and how much you charge.
- ctd 17y agoBut sometimes it's easier and faster to build something cool than to try to build a useful business product. I'm facing that dilemma now. Should I focus on the product I want to build and possibly fail months later with nothing to show for the effort and no budget left to live on (I'm still recovering from the last one)? Or should I build several smaller demo projects as portfolio pieces I can shop to get client work to fund the part-time development of my eventual product? Especially considering that my walled-off enterprise projects are inaccessible and built with tools other than the open source ones I'd prefer to be working with. It's almost like starting from scratch.