What are the preconditions to get an experienced developer from working as a freelancer to owning a small software company? [closed]

Question

I've been a software developer for 8 years. I've worked on about 20 projects, some smaller, some bigger. I know how to help myself by using google magic, msdn, youttube, tutorials, how-to's etc.

I'm playing around with the idea to get a friend of mine (who has been a software-developer for 5 years) and start my own software-developer-company.

What do you think are the preconditions to get myself from a freelancer to owning my own little company with 2-3 employees?

Answer 1

I did it and ran my company for two years

Couple of pointers that might help

1. Keep your costs to a bare minumum ( e.g. get an office only when you can sustain it )
2. Make sure you have enough investment even backup capital
3. With any business, think of it as a strand of thread. Both the start and end of the thread should be in your hands
4. Partnerships rarely work these days.
5. I do not like the sound of 'a friend of mine' . Come on, give an add in the paper you can get an actual employee you can formally instruct.
6. Also get the business on its feet by yourself first. You can do it. You have been doing freelance. Get the employee later only when you can't handle the load yourself
7. An employee's wage can be more than the rent of your office.
8. Make a rule, engrave it on your wall. Always 50% before the project starts and 50% before the project is handed over. This way you never run into problems.

Answer 2

I had my own company few years back from now. I was arguably too young/unexperienced to really handle 3 employees and my partner probably wasn't the best choice. But I can tell you, it is a hell lot of extra pressure and responsibility, that I felt I couldn't handle.

The thing is, if you are having problems with money as a freelancer, then that's not nice, but it's your problem and something you already accepted, when you choose freelancing over employment.
Your employees however chose a reliable income, and by employing them, you chose to provide that.

A question you should ask yourself: What is the advantage of a company?

As a company, you could take on bigger projects. But that is not, because you have a company's overhead, but because you have its infrastructure and manpower. However in the software industry, you can have the latter without the former.

An alternative to a company with employees is a freelancer network, i.e. a loose association of freelancers, such as you and your friend and possibly other people you've worked with, who complement your skill set.
You can share a lot of infrastructure, such as accounting, web site, portfolio, support, acquistion etc. while offering quite a lot of flexibility.
As a company with employees, you have to pay a lot of people, even when they're just sitting around. In the end, the customer must pay. With a freelancer network, this is not the case, which gives you an advertisable advantage. And also, nobody within the network has to take responsibility for everybody else, which is an advantage for you.

Answer 3

Being ready to make sacrifices is probably one of the preconditions.

• ... such as paying your employees before yourself when things don't go like you wish,
• ... or stay later because that customer did not understand he would have to wait another 2 business day to get his work done,
• ... or driving that old toyota an additional year because you didn't get pay on time for the last 3 projects and you are a bit short on money,
• ... or being really tired in the morning because last night in bed you were unable to remove all the problems you still have to solve from your mind,
• ... or loosing all your savings because you had to refill you company's bank account because your ignorance about taxes made you owe a significant amount of money to the gov,
• ... etc

If you can afford to go trough that kind of problems, you will succeed.

Please note that all the problems I'm listing can be avoided just by doing thing right. However very few people are capable of doing so. Looks like the average human needs to fail to learn. Telling the average human that he should do thing differently doesn't work.

Answer 4

It is hard working for yourself as others have said. You want to do some reading about running a business and what informs the decision to bring other people on board. On the whole the advice I have understood is to only take other people on when you have enough work that they will pay for themselves, but then to take other people on as soon as possible when that happens, so you can free yourself up to bring in more work. I would definitely avoid getting a group together until you have enough for each person in that group to do.

Depending on what kind of work you want to do it's worth reading some general books on business thinking- for example Richard Koch on 80/20 thinking is handy and I've heard Getting Real well recommended as well.

Think about what you enjoy. I worked for myself and what I found was that I got to do less of what I enjoy ( actual programming work ) and more administration, searching for opportunities, communicating with customers, chasing up late payments, chasing up late payments more, sending strongly worded letters about late payments and generally engaging in the parts of the work that I really didn't enjoy.