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The thing to avoid is to blaze ahead with a great product, since
as a technical type youll likely make something that you
wish you had, rather than something that the average Joe wishes they
had, and you will go out of business with lack of sales since the
number of people who want the neat thing you wish you had (and
are willing to pay for it since they need it and cant make it
themselves) is actually very low.
Step 0:
Figure out who you want your customer to be
Step 1:
Ask yourself to list what pains the customer is in without your product.
Make sure you are answering a "top 3 pains of the customer" issue
if your product does not answer a top three pains issue
for the prospective customer your product is likely not
worth developing.
Step 2:
Figure out bottoms up how you will get it to market, NOT top down like
"the market is X big and I can capture Y percent of X",
Top down never works. If you have a bottoms up plan of
"tuesday I will give a copy to X, and upload it to Y, then etc etc"
then you have a chance.
Step 3:
make a working prototype
Step 4:
start a C corp, make sure it owns the program, copyrights, patents, etc
Step 5:
show your prototype to a VC if you need lots of money - they will take 20% of your shares
no matter how little or much money they give you so try to get as far ahead as possible on your own
Step 6:
hire a bunch of outsourced programmers to do the grunt work, you manage them and write only key code yourself, unless your project is very small
Step 7:
sell your corporate shares and retire young.
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Since you don't have a mentor coach, but feel you need one, have you tried bringing this up your manager? Are you trying to gain experience and mentor-ship coding or running a business? If it is just coding, you can try joining some open source projects.
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"
— Hunter S. Thompson
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Hey Guys,
I've just landed my first contracting role (in the UK)!!! Wooo! 
For various reasons I'm opting to use an umbrella company for now as I'm just setting out down this path and was hoping for a little advice on good ones to consider before signing up to one.
Any info or links would be really appreciated.
Best,
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Just curious, why are you opting for an umbrella company?
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"
— Hunter S. Thompson
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I've found Giant to be good, but a lot of agents have a list of 'preferred' umbrellas they like you to go with (often, they have systems in place that simplify the whole timesheet/invoicing process)
I would seriously advise looking into setting up your own limited company though,
Doing so will allow you to pay yourself through share dividends rather than a salary (apart from a small salary, within the tax allowance, that most people prefer to pay themselves) which saves a noticeable amount in tax/NI (assuming your contract doesn't fall within IR35)
Its fairly simple to set a company up and even more so if you go through an accountant (mine costs £125 per month but looks to be able to save me approx £12,000 per year)
Pedis ex oris
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Hi i want to buy Reseller Hosting .. What r things i need to take care before buying and My requirements are that i want to run ASP.net + PHP + Java Web applications on that hosting ... Is dis Possible to do and any other point i need to consider please let me know .....like about server space ,, speed etc please guide me ... 
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It depends on how much load you are going to have...And consider windows hosting if you go for both php and asp.net..
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You might want to think about what some places are now calling "private clouds." They primarily seem to be managed Virtual Server boxes (VMWare/Hyper-V) in which then you manage the individual hosts. This way you could structure your environment to be however you wanted. The only downside of this is that you will have to spend more time in the sys-admin role getting everything set up.
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This section of the forum seems a little dead, but I'll give it a shot anyways.
Ok, so maybe the title's a bit of an exaggeration. But I am beginning to feel this way about salaried employment. I've only worked in two jobs but have talked to many others who describe a similar situation. Things are tedious in the corporate world, projects get stalled, code gets "maintained" (aka hundreds of format changes) and there's the inevitable waiting for approval and doing things to your bosses' "standards".
After reading a couple books on getting into consulting it seems like it might be the thing for me. What I'm hoping to find here is some advice or even better wisdom from others who have gone down this road.
I have 3 years experience and already feel like I am more productive and adept than my co-workers. I am by no means an expert but I also don't see my current line of work as a way to get to that level.
What are some of your regrets or decisions that you are grateful for having made? Is 3 years experience too early to start on my own? What can I do to better prepare myself for the business aspect of consulting?
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May I suggest reading this[^] set of articles?
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Thanks very much, exactly what i was looking for.
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What exactly do you mean by consulting? Do you simply mean doing contract work or do you mean real consulting? Are you talking about just simply telling recruiters to find you 3 or 6 month projects or are you talking about building a company where you sell your services?
Real consulting is probably 20% coding tops. The rest is sales and business analysis.
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I would like majority of my time to be coding. I realize to start this way I would need to work entirely with recruiters at first. My hope is that through networking and ambitious marketing I could gradually reduce the amount of leads found through recruiters.
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In this case, you are talking about going contracting.
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As Pete said, this is contracting and is VASTLY different from consulting or working for yourself. To run a consulting firm you need a wide range of skills, the LEAST of which is coding skills.
Depending on what country/region you are in contracting can also be quite different. In western countries a contractor is often required to have above norm skills and a fairly wide range of coding abilities. Whereas in Asia the contractor is considered the poor bugger who is not good enough to land a permanent job. Very different attitudes.
However if you think you are going to get away from delays, politics and bureaucracy think again, they are still there but with a little more pressure.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Thanks for the reply!
I guess what I was thinking is not consulting in the traditional sense that you two see, but as more of a specialized service. In my area there is a large pool of demand for .net programming(Chicago), so much that I think with the right networking I could work for myself without needing a headhunter to find me jobs.
I didn't dream up this job description either. The company I work for as well as my previous employer had specialized projects which were done by a purely .net consultant who would come in as needed to make suggestions/modifications.
I don't fancy starting a firm or having employees underneath me. Just the power to command more respect for my time and the opportunity work on a greater variety of projects. I realize that the politics and bureaucratic aspects of being a developer won't go away, but from what I've seen roadblocks get moved much quicker when there's a direct cost to them.
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shiznit770 wrote: which were done by a purely .net consultant
I did this sort of work in the 90s, one man show, T&M or sometimes fixed price, do the job from design to help system and training. You are right in that it commanded much more respect, it also required a very wide range of skills and it was a fascinatng to move into different industries and solve their problems.
It is still a lot of paperwork and admin, if you can keep it to a one man show it is survuvable, expand and see your coding time dissapear. Income is variable and it hurts when you (rarely) need to pass on a job b/c you are already too busy when you know you will be out of jobs in 6 weeks!
I eventually went to pure contracting.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Pages crawled per day only 700 while i have more than 500,000 pages
my website is
http://www.whomex.com my Pages crawled per day only 700 while i have more than 500,000 page
why this happen ?? how i can increse the Pages crawled per day
Category
Palestine
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Dear Developers,
it's quite some times that i have been thinking this question and couldn't find a settled answer for it.
it is, "Why would developer want to do a free software development ?"
free i mean is like "free beer"
software development i mean --> they offer the software on the internet for free downloading or "freeware".
so far i found the answer is "advertising". but it couldn't be for so long. i mean even hosting is paying, but why freeware ?
for example, "free download manager", "daemon tools lite", and some others. even some are very generous in "giving" their working result on the net for free.
i didn't against the free thing. only want to know, what could motivate developer to do it ?
sometimes i read that they sacrificed their holiday to develop it, their after work time, their free time... that is a "mean" sacrifice for me. few have specific dedication and/or personal goal...maybe.
but what is exactly the major fact of consideration for doing it ?
Thank you for any attention given to my question.
1st answer:
If you enjoy writing code or have developed something that scratches a personal itch why not give it to other people?
It's like wondering why people dress up as Furries, play board games, participate in sunday league football or cricket, do sudoku...
2nd answer:
I have also thought about that, open source i can understand. Because you got something you want to do with help from others.Freeware I don't know.
I know that Daemon tools lite is released as a light version.You try it, like it and you want more. Then you have to purchase the full version.
So sometimes you release a free version because you have an expensive Full version you want to sell.
Permalink | Broken Post? Report
Posted 19 hours ago
Söderlund933
3rd Answer
There is lot more to software then coding. You have to provide technical support, provide bug fixes, implement new features, and upgrade when new OS comes. For a small software it may not be worth to go through all this trouble, especially if expected user base is small.
So if you still want to share it with others then make it freeware.
Also when you use many freeware softwares and when you write a utility yourself then you might want to give back to community.
And as others mentioned, companies do it for advertisement. They provide a reduced functionality software for free and sell a more powerful software.
-Saurabh
Notes:
Previously i posted this message under question/answer section. but someone told me that the place is not for my question. and so i move the message to here. 
i also delete the question there, which i found that i shouldn't do that. i am sorry for that.
i posted my question with the already answered one.
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Good question.
I give some of my software away for free because it's generally a personal project that I've worked on that's been used as a bit of an R&D piece. I develop software commercially, but this is generally for clients and it means that you work within the rigid constraints of client requirements which generally doesn't give you much scope to try new things out. With the personal projects, I can code what I want and make it available for others to use - in effect, they become my beta testers and it helps me to find out what works and what doesn't. Partially, it's also an ego thing - it's great to get praise from others about utilities/applications that you pulled together.
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Ok, if i try to point out (according to my point of view) your answers:
1. personal project --> good reason.
2. Develop software commercially --> i like this!
3. beta testers --> yes this is acceptable for me.
4. ego thing --> hahahhaha... true enough.
my conclusion...hmmm... the formula:
giving free = develop software personally + can be sold for $$$ + tested + appreciation.
the answer hit me.
it motivates me to develop software and to share it.
thank you.
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Here are new questions for you to answer: why would people contribute to a site such as CodeProject? More in particular, why would anyone answer your question for free? Why did you expect anyone to do so?
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uhhmm... if it is worth of money then ask for it. but if it isn't then share it or just keep it myself.
would that be an answer for your and my question ?
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I don't know, I'm not very fond of "why" questions, except in a strict business environment, where they are essential.
I'm sure money isn't always the key. When a short question (a "how to" kind of helicopter view question) and a really good answer can keep me from making the wrong decision in one of my projects, then one hour spent on CodeProject can maybe save me months of development time, and some of that time can be returned to the community.
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