taprun

This is a problem that I've been struggling with as well.

I started calling myself a consultant, but I've found that seems to be a title that a LOT of hacks around here use.

I think the best approach is to make a name for yourself. Do people say "Seth Godin, the marketer" or just "Seth Godin"? When you can say "I'm notduncansmith", you can charge a premium, because no one else can say "I am notduncansmith" (Uggh, did you chose your username for the sole purpose of ruining my example??).

Long story short, when you get a reputation, title doesn't matter as much, and you can just be you.

In economics, I learned about something called a "trade-off". Basically, if you spend time learning something, you are spending that time not learning something else.

I remember meeting someone who was fantastic at chess. He destroyed me. Repeatedly. My mental model of him was essentially "me but good at chess". It didn't occur to me until much later that he didn't know how to program a computer, couldn't run a mile without stopping and didn't know how to cook Chinese food.

I think if you stop seeing people as "you but can do X", these feelings will go away. Alternatively, read up on the concept of "comparative advantage" and realize there is a mathematically proven reason not to try to be an expert at everything.

Well run companies exchange something they have (money) for an outcome they want.

Don't think of what you skills, degrees or characteristics. Think in terms of what you can provide. If you can't build software, can you build an audience? Can you find customers? Can you bring in investment dollars?

Your pitch should be something like "If you hire me, your company will ...".

Imagine these two scenarios:

We spent $50 million dollars advertising our free app and got 600 users in three weeks. Is that good? No, it's terrible.

We spent $0 in advertising and told one guy who wasn't even in our niche about our app that costs $1000 per month and got 600 users in three weeks. Is that good? It's awesome!

Take a look at your ongoing costs, marketing costs per signup, customer lifetime value, customer feedback and value being generated for your customers.

Sometimes job ads are written this way to allow a company to say that no qualified candidate exists. They are then able to bring in an H1B.

Do this the same way you'd get more people to buy it, if you were selling it.

* Reduce barriers to entry - make sure that your product is easy to find, easy to install (or to setup an account), easy to use, easy to see its value * Figure out who your ideal user is. Who will get the absolute most value out of your product? * Document exactly how easy it is for your ideal user to get some specific "quick wins" with it. Pick one as your "primary pitch". * Figure out where your ideal user hangs out and describe the "quick wins" from above. Find people who are actively complaining about problems and say "Oh by the way, this easy-to-use free software will fix that for you". * When those users are happy, ask them to tell their friends.

You may find "The Ringelmann effect" to be an interesting footnote to this topic. It states that group members become less efficient as group size increases.

I'd be very interested to see you point out a form of governance which does scale. Even totalitarian regimes start to buckle under large population sizes.

You have a service that allows me to send in pictures of a whiteboard to get clean PDFs.

OK, what's the benefit to me as a user? If you can't answer that question, you'll have some issues getting users to sign up. Does it save me time, make me more money, reduce my headaches?

Maybe professors / whoever writes on whiteboards aren't your customers. For instance, When I was in college, the staff would pay people to take notes for disabled students. What if you set up a service where colleges could just have those types of people take snapshots of the board at various intervals. Then disabled students wouldn't have to worry about taking notes. You might even be able to get some grants, free press from non-profits and federal agencies.

It also might be interesting to think about how SlideShare and Flickr and other "send us files with pictures in them" type companies sell their products to the masses.

No, it's not too late, but I wouldn't necessarily think that a degree will be some kind of magic bullet. Rather than spending lots of money on a degree, just try to get some experience. Experience is more valuable than a degree for many jobs.

What's your unrelated field? The software world exists to solve problems. You may be able to leverage your previous experience and make you more valuable than the average new-to-programming person.

For instance, a programmer with a background in tax prep would be more valuable to accounting software companies than a programmer without. There is software written to do anything. Target companies where your background will give you an advantage.

I've been speaking to a whole lot of folks trying to start tech businesses lately. Tech guys all say the same thing - they can build products, but have no idea how to get customers.

You are in a perfect position. Not only do you have skills they don't have, but you also have time (which they also probably don't have).

Why don't you just head over to a coworking space or two and offer to give a free presentation on how to market new software products. Talk about basic advertising 101 - creating customer profiles, segmenting markets, etc. Then close by saying that you run a software marketing business and can coach for a fee or sell for a commission (perhaps ~33%).

I'd email you with more details, but I don't see your info in your profile. Feel free to email me, or use the contact form on the website in my profile.

I'm not an Aussie, but I saw two films starring Paul Hogan.

I'm trying to make this transition as well. I think it basically boils down to the following: Ask lots of people what their problems are (lead generation, paperwork and team coordination appear common themes), explain how you can help them out while using non-technical talk and then charge them. I'm hopefully going to start doing that next week.

Here's my response: nerds focus on long-term optimization whereas jocks focus on premature optimization (in computer science speak, think "Big O" values for 10,000n vs 2^n).

As a result, nerds are seen as low value at the present and subconsciously remind jocks that their maximum values are relatively low in the long term.

It sounds like you are trying to optimize for two goals:

1) Contribute to open source 2) Limit the amount of time you spend on tasks that don't contribute to your company

The solution seems simple enough. Examine the open source tools that you use to build your company. When you find problems, issues or inefficiencies in those tools, fix them. This will hopefully improve the tools and speed up your work on your company at the same time.

Alternatively, give the tools free press in your Twitter/Facebook/blog/whatever communications and hopefully you'll encourage someone else to contribute instead. As an added bonus, such communications may help spread word of your company.

As someone that has not used Twitter much and often made fun of it, your response was very close to my initial answer.

Thinking about it more though, I would say that Twitter should not be compared to blogs. I think Twitter is more like IRC. Twitter is a simpler version of IRC for the masses that can be used via dumb phones. Add in hash tags, search and an easy to use filtering system, and Twitter actually seems pretty good.

I'd suggest trying to think about what types of things you want to build in the future and then picking a language that is used to build those types of things.

I can shout "learn assembler" until the cows go home, but if you want to go into AI and hate the idea of being an embedded programmer, then you'd be much better off learning LISP.

When I was a bit younger, everyone told me to learn PERL, because PERL was very powerful. I learned it, but never really needed it, because I never needed to write software that was heavy on text processing or system administration. If I were able to do it all over again, I would have picked R instead, because it would have been much more useful for my career path.

I would go see my ex-boss' boss and tell him that we're down two people, and while I can keep things going somewhat smoothly for a few weeks, things are going to start breaking due to a lack of manpower.

Then, I'd tell him that I already had the names of a few people to interview (having selecting people I already knew). If you do it right you'll

a) Guarantee that you're working with staff you like b) Be able to redefine your role (for example, from Sr. Software Engineer to Software Architect or Support Analyst to Programmer). c) Create a reputation as a guy that solves problems independently and removes headaches from his superiors

Fortunes, careers and reputations are made by fixing problems in times of chaos, not by staying with the status quo or coasting in a comfortable path.

Hi there. I'm looking at your site, and I don't immediately see anything that tells me why I should pay for an account. How will my life improve by giving you money? Will it bring in some dollars? Will it build my internet fame? For all I know, every single one of my needs might be solved by your product, but I won't know that if you don't tell me.

What I would suggest is that you figure out the type of person that would be an ideal customer - someone who would not only be willing to pay, but would be thrilled to pay. It might be psychologists focusing on PTSD. It might be physical therapists working with recently paralysed customers. It could be someone else entirely. Then, go out and start contacting them to a) validate your message b) get some sales.

Incidentally, it's quite difficult to compare your different plans. I'd suggest that you make it more scannable like Basecamp does: https://basecamp.com/start#prices

It looks like demand for Delphi programmers is down by roughly 2/3 since 2006 (relative to other languages). Source: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=delphi&l=

There's a big thread on Reddit that suggests programming to video game music, as it's designed to be in the background. Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1u4xh1/lpt_look...

Hi Michael, I'd strongly suggest adding more detail. For instance, you mention "Travel Blog Success" - adding a URL (so we can see what you did) and more details (so that we understand what you did) would be helpful. You managed sales. Great. Does that mean you contacted customers, set targets or something else?

Similarly, when you were freelancing, you built some plug-ins. What were they, and how can I test them out? Are any of them popular? Did they demonstrate any particular expertise or ability to understand your users?

It looks like you did some interesting things, you just need to help us to understand what they were.