If you’ve been developing software for companies on a freelance basis for a number of years, perhaps it might be time you raised your ambitions slightly and looked into the possibility of starting your own company. Writing codes all day long is something you’re obviously very good at, but is it really what you want to be doing day in, day out for the rest of your working life? Wouldn’t it be much better to spend your time obtaining contracts and simply overseeing a large team of cutting edge developers? I think we all know the answer to that one.
I’ve decided to release this article today in the hope of giving you some much needed motivation. Although you may well have a talent for software design and creation, there’s a limit to how much money a single person can earn in this profession on their own. By opting to start a new specialist company, you’ll be able to accept much larger and effectively more complicated jobs, and with them will come a significantly more impressive level of pay.
Identify Your Niche
During the early stages of starting your software development firm, you’ll need to select a niche and specialise in providing services and products within it. This is because the amount of people working for your company will be limited until you start to expand, so it’s best to keep all operations as similar as possible. To select this niche, spend some time with all the developers working for you and find out about their individual skills. If most of them find their talents are better suited to mobile app making than full scale software solutions, this is where you should begin.
Raising Your Startup Capital
There are many methods for dealing with this, most of which should be open to you so long as you have a decent credit history. Your first stop should be the bank. Though these institutions have been less inclined to lend to new firms recently, with your experience and a good business plan you might be surprised by the assistance they offer. Alternatively, you could try to see investment from a private equity firm, but be prepared to hand over a significant chunk of your profits if this road seems most appealing.
Finally, it’s actually possible to get tax credits for research and development in some circumstances, so this is something you definitely need to look into if funding is becoming an issue.
Winning Lucrative Contracts
So long as you’re good at what you do, winning contracts should be simple. All you need to do is pay for some online advertising, target it correctly and wait for potential customers and clients to find you. However, if this is going a little slow, there’s obviously nothing stopping you from creating useful software packages for sale on the open market. Again, so long as the product is top quality and useful, you should have no trouble selling it to people online.
All of this can be easily completed in less than 6 months, meaning your business could be in profit and making its mark on the work as soon as August this year if you get your skates on. You don’t even need to rent a premises to work from, as most developers are more than happy to work from home.
My advice? Go for it!
What have you got to lose?