3 ms·

How do you find new customers?

JangoSteve 8y ago
Can't speak for the OP, but as we do the same thing, figured I'd contribute our answer. We're not great at "sales", so it's been completely organic growth and word-of-mouth. I went to a lot of events and meetups for startups, and talked to people about what they were doing and what we do. I've also done a lot of open source development, including working on the Rails core team and building our own projects like Dynatable.js. This took a lot of time to cultivate a sales pipeline. The company was just me for the first 4 years, occasionally sub-contracting as needed. Then over the next 6 years, we grew to 6 people, and are currently in the process of finding a developer-consultant to join as our 7th.
oldboyFX 8y ago
For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year. We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively. It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up. We don't really do any speaking, blogging, traveling to conferences to network, or anything like that. I just advertise on a couple of websites like HN who wants to be hired, for hire subreddit, angel list, startupers.com, etc to let people know we're on the market looking for a new project. We usually find someone who is a good fit within a couple of weeks. We are also involved in the local tech community and in the past we would get some projects through word-of-mouth, but those were at lower rates near the beginning of our careers. You could also try platforms like codementorX and moonlightwork until you manage to connect with someone yourself.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to reply. I have a lot of work through word of mouth at the moment. I was more curious how someone in central Europe (Croatia?) finds high paying customers in the US. You make it sound much simpler than I anticipated.
  - oldboyFX 8y ago
    It is simpler than we anticipated as well. I will say that many of our past clients had something in common — a recent ugly experience with one or more other development teams. So far we have a history of delivering on what we promised (knock on wood), and we make sure to communicate that there is a very high chance that we will be the last team they will have to hire to solve their problem. There's one more thing... A couple of years ago we created a passion project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351) that experienced quite a lot of traffic. I'm not sure how much influence (if any) this had on our ability to find clients, but a few of them did tell us how cool it was.

Can't speak for the OP, but as we do the same thing, figured I'd contribute our answer. We're not great at "sales", so it's been completely organic growth and word-of-mouth. I went to a lot of events and meetups for startups, and talked to people about what they were doing and what we do. I've also done a lot of open source development, including working on the Rails core team and building our own projects like Dynatable.js. This took a lot of time to cultivate a sales pipeline. The company was just me for the first 4 years, occasionally sub-contracting as needed. Then over the next 6 years, we grew to 6 people, and are currently in the process of finding a developer-consultant to join as our 7th.

oldboyFX 8y ago

For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year. We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively. It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up. We don't really do any speaking, blogging, traveling to conferences to network, or anything like that. I just advertise on a couple of websites like HN who wants to be hired, for hire subreddit, angel list, startupers.com, etc to let people know we're on the market looking for a new project. We usually find someone who is a good fit within a couple of weeks. We are also involved in the local tech community and in the past we would get some projects through word-of-mouth, but those were at lower rates near the beginning of our careers. You could also try platforms like codementorX and moonlightwork until you manage to connect with someone yourself.

rorykoehler 8y ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I have a lot of work through word of mouth at the moment. I was more curious how someone in central Europe (Croatia?) finds high paying customers in the US. You make it sound much simpler than I anticipated.
- oldboyFX 8y ago
  It is simpler than we anticipated as well. I will say that many of our past clients had something in common — a recent ugly experience with one or more other development teams. So far we have a history of delivering on what we promised (knock on wood), and we make sure to communicate that there is a very high chance that we will be the last team they will have to hire to solve their problem. There's one more thing... A couple of years ago we created a passion project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351) that experienced quite a lot of traffic. I'm not sure how much influence (if any) this had on our ability to find clients, but a few of them did tell us how cool it was.