There are often two different approaches to building a business - volume (cheap price), niche (high price) specialty. What are you?
Do you build for restaurants? Profedssional offices? People like to know what you have done and that you have done what you are going to do for them before (successfully)
Also, I am not sure it was covered here - but people buy from people they know and trust.
If you ''need" to get a job today - it is rather like ‘needing’ to start a relationship TODAY. People will run away or ‘sense’ your anxiety a mile away. Not good.
When you are starting to build a business, you need a secondary form of income. It takes 3 - 5 years to build something worthwhile.
So, in summary, the best advice is to have a second job, network, and introduce yourself to businesses face to face.
There is wayyyyy to much Facebook / social medis marketing out there. As a small business owner, I hate it. I would hire someone who walked into my office to smile and say hello 100x over the random email from ‘joe blow’.
Face to face sales, pounding the pavement, patience and a seconary form of income - there are no shortcuts and no ‘quick fixes’. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke.
thx
Karen
I wanted to be the latter, but that seems impossible in this “IT-for-a-buck” world that we live in.
This weekend I was traveling, and had lots of time to reflect on my situation, my business hopes, and life in general. Right or wrong, here are some conclusions that I have reached on my own…
First, it is impossible to compete with WordPress and SquareSpace websites. I can’t even stage a fake photo with fake actors in a fake boardroom in an expensive glass skyscraper for what is out there. (That alone would cost me a couple thousand dollars even though people don’t get that.)
Second, I will never be able to build a website of any substance for a few hundred dollars or even a few hundred hours. Websites and applications are enormously complex, and not some you bang out in a day or with a few lines of code.
Third, the only way to combat #1 and #2 is this… Find a problem out their, write whatever code it takes to solve it, and then instead of trying to peddle to a single business, mass-produce it and try and sell it at a reasonable cost - as far as most cheap business owners are concerned - to hundreds and thousands of people/businesses. In other words, start building and selling applications whether they be in the form of websites, web apps, mobile apps, or software you install.
A major issue I have to overcome. All I have in my portfolio right now is a modest website where I took a business from unlisted to page #1 of Google in 10 searches. I think that is okay, but I’m peeved at the owner for complaining about what I charged him - which came out to less than $15/hour - so I have decided to not use him as an example of my work.
So, six months after starting this endeavor, I have learned a lot about responsive design and business, but I am starting out at square one, with no customers and no portfolio. At the same time, I have spent the last 6 months building a decent responsive website, and as I slowly write more content for it and add new features, I hope it will serve as a starting point for my work.
You are a wise women, Karen!
I have struggled with this very concept in many areas of my life, and while I hate to admit it, you are 110% correct.
Of course, it is a catch-22… How do you tell a starving person to not think of food or be hungry when that is exactly where they are in life? It takes $$$ to make $$$, and when you have none, you have a hell of a hurdle to get over!
You are correct on both points.
I have struggle to replace the “real” job I lost earlier in 2015. Am making a little progress, but that is what has torpedoed all of last year.
It is good to know there are still people out there like you.
I finished my website a month ago, and as I have time I am filling it up with content. I also had 1,000 business cards printed at a real printer - of course we had to move so I now have 1,000 business cards with an out-of-state tele #
And when I have time I am trying to approach businesses in person - often people I somewhat know from where I shop or maybe from contractors from other odd jobs I have had.
So I am taking your advice here.
Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts. You gave some great advice, although it is hard to not show your desperation when the need for food and money is very real…
No probs, my approach may be a little different as I am a business person /MBA type learning programming so that I can build what I want. Not the other way around. Still, I also face the other problem as I had thought to use some of the programming skills I had learned to earn some extra income (now as per your conclusions, I have decided not do bother). Another way of approaching your problem that I am debating is to approach it from a ‘marketing’ perspective. Now, as a coder, perhaps you shudder at that approach. But, due to the language problems, lack of trust, lack of local understanding, lack of cultural understanding - i.e.a whole host of problems that as a business owner I can see that local people can deliver uniquely. These companies appear to be prospering. So, perhaps wrap your IT coding skills into a form of marketing - find some marketing person at your local university, forum, blah blah, and partner with them to deliver a ‘whole’ solution. People want cusotmers - buyers, solutions , not just the IT structure if that makes sense.
It is very hard to build anything of coding substance and sell it for what people are willing to pay. So I think the smarter approach is to find common problems for which there is no solution or for which there is a solution but you can come up with a better one. Then write code to fix that problem, and sell it to the masses.
My barber might like a way to allow people to book haircuts on their smartphones, but he isn’t willing to pay me for the time it takes me to devise such a solution. But if I invest in creating such a solution, and then can sell it to my barber, and thousands of others, then I stand a chance to make a lot of money.
People say there is an app for everything, but I don’t think there are quality solutions for everything.
I think my latest observation, combined with your earlier advice of building face-to-face relationships is a good way to tackle the larger dilemma of drumming up business.
Cool, that is where I am
Albeit, I am a business person who is learning to code (and find it thrilling oddly enough) to create what I am particularly interested in building - an online solution to a problem.
As opposed to the other way around. So, seems like we are arriving to a similar place.
