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Comment by sqs | Hacker News Reader

Sourcegraph CEO here. Kevin Burke (the author) worked with us at Sourcegraph for some important projects in late 2018 (including helping to prepare a big product release). It was a joy working with him. I’ve worked with a lot of contractors and would love it if more people followed these guidelines.

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This recommendation, solicited or not, is a very strong example of how to market a consulting business. Sales for consulting businesses can be more than half the trick to making it go and selling services requires credibility. Most consulting businesses that I'm aware of start with one or a small number of existing relationships with built-in credibility and usually the business is started with at least one sale in pocket. When it's time to try and go beyond your initial customers recommendations especially public ones from past happy customers go a long way to establishing credibility and shortening the sales cycle. So it pays double or more in the long run if you can establish relationships with and take care of the directors, VPs and CEOs that you're working for regardless of who the hiring manager is.

My recommendation was not solicited, for the record. I read HN, saw the domain, recognized it was Kevin, and posted entirely on my own.

(I agree with your reply!)

Thanks Quinn! Sourcegraph was a pleasure to work with!

The article mentions that incorporation is a protection against loss. The best protection are successes like these. Like what you do, and like helping other people even more.

Do anything you can to stay out of court and everything you can to leave on good terms. Having an LLC is not a license to mess up. If anything it raises the standards, and people will still come after you, sometimes even if you did a good job!

You still need to stop squatting on langserver.org like you created the protocol.

Your list of implementations is outdated and best belongs in a git repo.

It is in a repository: https://github.com/langserver/langserver.github.io. We try to keep it up to date but rely on authors and PRs, too. We’ll do an audit (and if you see any outdated ones, please let us know).

BTW, I emailed you but didn’t hear back after you posted a similar reply to my last HN comment. Can you let me know what wording you’d suggest to avoid confusion? My intent is for the wording to be clear.

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