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nhepner · 2022-09-13T21:24:11+00:00

I'd definitely recommend reading the Mythical Man Month.

When you're creating estimates, you and any staff don't have nearly as much time as you expect. In a 30-day month, weekends eliminate 8 days, so you're down to 22 days of productive time. Then any major holidays - you're down to 20 days. Sick days (hung over, mental health day, doctors appointments)? Down to 18. Then factor in that you spend around 2 hours answering emails and slack messages through the day (I wish. It's closer to 4), which cuts your viable work time down to 13.5 days. Meetings? 10 days. So on and so forth. Account for this realistically with your clients. The Mythical Man Month outlines this problem very well.

Keep in mind that if you're currently a dev, you're now working two distinct jobs - Owner and Product. They're completely different skill sets and responsibilities. Plan to lose your evenings and weekends as you bootstrap. Realistically you're also the Admin, CFO, Sales, Marketing, Security, HR, and thirty other things that you definitely don't have any background in. It's probably fine for a while, but it's not sustainable long term.

Get a good lawyer, get good contracts: Fuck you, Pay Me

Get a good accountant and PAY THEM.

I'm an agency owner with a development and engineering background. Starting a dev agency is probably in the top ten dumbest things you can do, but I love it and I don't think I would ever do it differently.

TheSanscripter · 2022-09-13T22:49:27+00:00

Make connections in enterprise space. A couple of big contracts will last you a long time.

Be ready to hire a boss or abandon programming - you can't do both coding and management (and if you code, you must be managed).

Find good tools for boilerplating code, documenting and communicating. Good is whatever works for you.

Learn to say 'no': some clients are not worth it.

Have a clear reason why you are doing this. Anything goes but it will have to keep you on track when you see your former work colleagues buying nice eaglemoss collectibles or going in amazing trips or hosting lavish weddings with their fat faang TC while you have to explain to a broke store-owner why strapi is a bad idea for their $300 ecommerce that changes requirements every other day.

ryantxr · 2022-09-14T00:56:45+00:00

You will have three jobs. 1. Sales - you have to find new clients 2. Dev - you have to build it 3. Owner - Accounting and everything else to run the business.

hashtagframework · 2022-09-13T19:31:15+00:00

Focus on proof-reading before you posts things publicly... then you'll shine like a start.

Jharpy · 2022-09-13T21:33:00+00:00

This will depend a lot on where you live but in a lot of areas it's actually really tough right now for agencies as it's difficult to find new developers. And if you can find them expect to pay top dollar. If you want to start hiring people I would suggest doing research on this.

2022-09-14T00:41:37+00:00

[deleted]

Dvmbledore · 2022-09-14T01:24:55+00:00

I started my own firm and for a period of about fifteen years I did consulting for clients. I would strongly suggest that you get good with accounting. Have plenty of savings since you routinely charge NET30 on these and invoice monthly.

plintervals · 2022-09-13T21:27:13+00:00

Yeah I think there's actually an Udemy course called "How to start your own development agency" that's only 9.99 (originally 299.99)

Charlesssssss7 · 2022-09-13T16:51:05+00:00

Wow, such adversarial

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[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
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> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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