On May 8th 2011, we kicked off the office. With me as the CEO, Business Development Manager, Developer and Peon all in one. First Target was to setup a decent profile on online bidding systems, seeked help of colleagues and friends, talked to anyone I could think of with experience. Must say my first feeling was this would be the easy part, but as I understood later a good profile can be very helpful in conviencing people that you know the trade, I was advised to take on a small projects in the start and then gradually move to bigger ones (logical), so when bidding process started I would look for quick jobs that did not pay much but got the ball rolling, well guess what a lot of people are looking for the same.... so it ended up looking like a dog fight where people were bidding 40~50% lower than what I deemed to be a fair price, after about 100 bids on different systems I got one Nop Commerce customization project from Odesk. The client played some hard ball and also showed some carrot and got me to lower the bid by 25% but I was happy, I had My First Project.
But the dampener to my happiness was the client requirement that kept changing every so slightly in the start and later went all together different direction. and when I raised the issue with him I was seen as playing the client, and you don't want a bad rating on portals like Elance and Odesk as lot depends on it, so you give in... something I had been hearing from my previous boss all along.... so you compromise and have that bit done.
To be fair to the client he was right, specs always change and about 3 years as Delivery Head Experience should have tough me that. But its very different when you start a new venture there is no fallback plan, no resource shuffling or re-alignment of goals... all you have is this one thing and you dearly want to hold on to it.
Well give or take this was a great start, I had a project some seed money, that would not suffice to buy a months groceries but better than nothing.
One of the things I have learned from life is one step at a time does it.
To be fair to the client he was right, specs always change and about 3 years as Delivery Head Experience should have tough me that. But its very different when you start a new venture there is no fallback plan, no resource shuffling or re-alignment of goals... all you have is this one thing and you dearly want to hold on to it.
Well give or take this was a great start, I had a project some seed money, that would not suffice to buy a months groceries but better than nothing.
One of the things I have learned from life is one step at a time does it.
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