BenCurtis.com

Many moons ago I wrote a quick status report on my first 100 days of Rails consulting. Now that it has been over a year since I joined the freelance world full time, I figured it was a good time to reflect again on that experience.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again—this experience has been a blast. I may go to work for someone else again at some point in the future, but for now I’m loving being independent. I’ve learned to manage the stress of worrying about where the next check is coming from, and I’ve gotten into a rhythm with the ebb and flow of client work, so life is good.

If you happen to need someone to help you build your web application, drop me a line. My schedule stays pretty full, so don’t wait until the last minute to get in touch!

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring. :)

I got an email from Amazon about their new WebStore by Amazon offering. Like Shopify, it’s a just-add-water storefront for people wanting to sell their products.

This seems like a natural step for Amazon, considering their recent product offerings like payment processing and fulfillment services.

Perhaps my days of building custom e-commerce applications for clients like Griffin Technology are numbered?

From time to time I get emails from people asking for some lessons I’ve learned in my time as a Rails freelancer, so I thought I’d jot some notes down for all to enjoy. Despite the title, these tips aren’t really Rails-specific. :)

1. Marketing: One question I often get is “how do I market myself?” The short answer is to just get your name out there. I have found that my blog, my hosting of the Rails plugin directory, and my Rails guides all help clients find me and become aware of my experience and expertise with Rails. So, the first tip is to create visibility for yourself by adding to the conversation. If I had more time, I would contribute more to open source Rails projects (or Rails itself) too, and I’d recommend that to anyone.
2. Pricing (part 1): Everybody wants to know how they should set their rates. I’ll leave to another post my thoughts on hourly vs. fixed-bid pricing, but here is the best tip I can give on pricing: if you are billing by the hour, set your rate so that you can profit on billing for just one-third of your working time. I can almost guarantee that you will spend the other two-thirds of your time on non-billable work such as finding work, tracking down payments for work completed, worrying about your bank account balance, etc.
3. Pricing (part 2): Be confident in your pricing. If you don’t believe your time is valuable, nobody else will either. You will have to answer the question about your rate time and time again, and how you answer it will definitely play a role in whether the person asking the question will accept your answer. Obviously the experience and skills you bring to the table have a large part to play in the rate you’ll be able to get, but don’t ignore the power of self-confidence.
4. Stress Management: Leaving the comfort of a full-time role to join the ranks of the self-employed can introduce you to a whole new world of stress. Though of course your full-time salary isn’t guaranteed, and can disappear at any time, that income is a lot more reliable than the one that will come from your almost non-stop efforts of trying to find the next gig. So, find a way to manage stress. It may be a supportive spouse (highly recommended!) or a favorite sport, but find a way and make the time to preserve your health, so you can continue the “good life” of working for yourself.
5. Always be selling: You are the product that needs to be sold, and you are the one that’s selling it. You should always be selling yourself. Whether that takes the form of looking for gigs, or networking in your local business community, or writing blog posts—you’ll need to experiment to find what will be the best use of your time. But you must continue to spend the time to sell yourself, to keep your sales funnel full. Keeping the top of the funnel full with prospects is essential to keep money flowing out of the bottom of it.

I hope that list is helpful. There’s nothing revolutionary there, but it is indeed a formula for success. Have fun!

Here’s a quick update on some one-on-one Rails training that I’ve been doing. With the help of Skype and Yugma, a web-conferencing tool that actually works on the Mac, I’ve been able to offer my clients over-the-shoulder sessions as I walk them through Rails topics such as deployment and testing, or even help them build their apps as they watch along.

It’s quite fun to get to the end of the session and hear comments like “I can’t believe how much we got done”, “this will save me so much time”, and “wow, that was really cool!” It’s also cool to read the blog post of a happy Rails training client — thanks Joon!

If this sounds like something you’d like to do, get your own Ruby on Rails personal coach today! :)

In response to my post about being a Ruby on Rails consultant, a few seemed interested in my writing more about the business side of being a freelance developer, so this post is the first in a series on the topic. The first thing I decided to write about is business insurance, since it doesn’t seem to be discussed a whole lot in blog posts of this sort.

I was introduced to the world of business insurance by a kind client who suggested I really ought to look into it. It was something that I figured I would get to eventually, but wasn’t in a rush to do. After doing a bit of research, though, and getting some insurance for my LLC, I now recommend to anyone that will listen to get business insurance sooner rather than later. If you are looking into getting some insurance for yourself, the first thing you need to know is that there are, in fact, two types of insurance you should investigate.