> If you have a relationship with existing clients, know they business, and they decline you offers to get more serious for <50% TCO, this is a big red flag.

> If you have a relationship with existing clients, know they business, and they decline you offers to get more serious for <50% TCO, this is a big red flag. I don't look for employment with the clients I have been able to get so far. To be frank they are all bad unit economics business of the month club subscribers. None of the established shops will talk to them anymore because they are problem customers who demand endless rounds of revisions and pay late. > The process of writing software is among the trivial parts of building a software startup. Development work is rarely connected to cashflows, and should not be incentivized as a rev-share based on specific feature/module. Agree. My value prop is I am a vertically integrated engineer who does sales. I develop the connection with new customers on my own time and dime. I get conversations and listen to their problems. I directly interpret what the customer says they want into the engineering deliverables they actually want. Then I come back to the eng team and we split up the work with me as an IC. Generally others do the backend while I do the UI design and frontend work. After the deliverable I proactively ensure customer success, often times committing tweaks/fixes myself. I upsell. I think commission is absolutely reasonable these circumstances because I made that sale happen. These sale would not exist without me driving the process at every step. I am not a great sales person. I can't sell sand to Arabs. Otherwise I would be able to sell these companies on a commission comp structures. But for startups with a strong product that sells itself once the customer understands what it can do for them, my vertical integration with engineering leads to dramatically quicker recognition of revenue because the two communication boundaries between sales <-> eng and eng <-> product lie inside a single person: me. I am already doing this right now as a freelancer. I represent two other engineers and together we build the deliverable, but I handle the client facing interactions and running down new business. I think it would be so much easier to sell an actually good product for one company rather than roving around the bay touching up pigs's lipstick.