Help software developers work on their own!

December 31, 2011 11:16 AM

I've been working with a group of 2 other senior engineers for several years. We each have about ten years experience doing web development, mainly doing high volume e-commerce sites. Our work is client services based, companies come to our company to build sites out. We'd like to do this for ourselves. Our question is very basic, what our options for bidding work or getting clients? Do recruiters ever have projects they give out to bid? Bonus: the other two engineers are female, so we'd qualify for any contracts that give weight to women owned businesses.

We're very good at what we do, work well as a team and have investors in place. Several of us have experience with startups, but no one wants to get into straight product development. We want to do client service work, ideally we'd like to land a project, and then six month later do another project. We've hit the pavement and are networking like crazy, we're locally recognized as good developers. We're invited to conferences and give talks at local meetups, and while we have a few prospects through this, these relationships seem to take a long time to build.

So we have a few questions we're came up with and are throwing out there:

- Perhaps I'm remembering the halcyon dot-com days, but do tech recruiters ever bid out projects? If so, how do we find these types of recruiters?
- Most, if not all, of the software development bid sites seem packed with low-quality projects and people underbidding each other. We're not interested in this sort of work.

I would like to emphasize we aren't kids out of college looking to be the next Facebook. The analogy we like using is that we're a bunch of lawyers at a large law firm and want to open up our own practice. Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we're not allowed to take our clients with us.

Any other thoughts would be great. Our goal, again, is simply to work for ourselves. We're not married to the idea of doing straight development and would definitely do consulting and training, but we have no clue how to go about that. If you'd like to keep the conversation private, here's a throwaway address we're using: [e-mail]

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Make friends. There are lots of people - like me - who do product strategy work and partner with developers to build out web and mobile apps. I think it's unlikely that you'll find this work via recruiters - meetups and conferences, as you suggest, are more effective. Sometimes this does take some long lead time.
posted by judith at 11:58 AM on December 31, 2011 [3 favorites]

I encourage you to read "The E Myth" It's main premise addresses your situation where the "technician" decides to go-it alone and get rid of the "boss".
posted by humboldt32 at 1:24 PM on December 31, 2011

I spent a decade plus as a partner in a medium-sized e-dev firm back in those halcyon days, as well as in the long days of decay after the busts of the early '00s. Let me tell you with all the emphasis I can muster* that the actual building of projects -- the actual work -- is the least stressful and easiest part of the entire business.

Sales, accounting, employees and HR, taxes, billing, administration, and customer service and support will absolutely drain away all of your time, attention and your very soul. You will long for the salad days, back when all you had to worry about was building things well, when all the annoying business details were Someone Else's Problem.

Also, no offense, but IME, even great engineers tend to make awful business-owners. I think it's because they are wired for the problem solving, not the business or human factors.

*If I was more sober I could be more coherent sorry. Happy New Year.
posted by rokusan at 4:45 PM on December 31, 2011