Here is some stuff that I have learned recently about entrepreneurship and freelancing

I hope that it’ll inspire you 🙂

Entrepreneurship⌗

If you have a product, build a website to sell it!⌗

I have been sitting on a good product for two years; but I only really sold it from word-of-mouth because I was too lazy to create a website.

What I overlooked is that my product would evolve in the direction of what it’s user needs; so I found myself creating a product that caters to a specific super small niche instead of going for B2C.

I also absolutely excluded B2C as a possibility because of legal reasons; but I shouldn’ve have.

Now that I have a website online, I feel like I’m going in the right direction. I will finally be rewarded for all the effort I put in in the last 2 years.

Also, making a website and acquiring tons of customers is fun! I always wanted to do this.

I’m glad that I’m not neglecting this desire anymore. (thanks to my partner)

Be obsessed about quality⌗

And, to those few customers we were actually selling too; we were not super worried about quality.

Outages⌗

What? 7 days service outage? Don’t care 😎

What? The new feature that I’m introducing is absolutely making you like a fool to your downstream customers? Not my problem. You’re not happy? Don’t come back. There is so much money anyway that it’s not going to change a lot for me.

…

It turns out that investing a few hours each day in quality control can lead to great results. None of our customers is complaining anymore; and if they do, they get a satisfactory answer soon enough. We also implemented separate dev and production environments to be able to release features without taking too much risk.

A company’s success is measured by the satisfaction of it’s customers.

And I’m going to hold by that standard from now on, and really try to uphold to it.

Pricing⌗

You want me to give you precise pricing? Well, tell me how much you can pay 🦈🙂 Now, we have transparent pricing.

“pricing is part of the product”.

Freelance⌗

Alignment⌗

I recently made a big mess because I wasn’t really aligned with my customers’ intents.

An easy fix would’ve been to give me the key metrics to monitor before starting the project.

I believe that, when freelancing, the success metric is “alignment”: am I working towards the customer’s higher-order goal at a good pace? Or am I digging down into a useless rabbit hole? Am I hurting their bottom line, or improving it?

  1. Figure out what the customer wants
  2. Go hog-wild for it.

The same holds true for entrepreneurship; is my priority really to have the best infrastructure, or to start building a satisfied customer base before the opportunity runs out?