New Year, new Company. Or is it?

Great advice guys, it’s great to see you helping each other out.

bobocel said
theRiviera, if you will start an agency, I have 3+ years of experience with Vuzum, and I can share some advices:

To Do:

1. Have money set aside. You will need them.
2. Make sure you hire the best people you can afford.
3. Fight for every good client. Fire the bad clients. (you better keep a good developer, than a bad client)
4. As you are ready to quit your job, I must ask this – do you have enough work to keep you up until 3AM every day already? If not, you might want to reconsider giving up the job, and trying to get projects first. It’s a very competitive market.
5. Give-up on Flash, or at least don’t focus on it with the agency. Flash projects are rare or dead, or underpaid. It’s the fruit.
6. Buy macs. You won’t believe how much development time will save.
7. If you followed #6, practice with some mobile apps. It’s the trend and you’ll get a lot of requests.
8. Move to USA or UK. There’s a lot of big clients there, and the competitiveness of our pricing, combined with the strong passion and skills of Europeans are pure gold. (it’s still on my list)
9. Might not seem important at first, but.. get an amazing name, there’s a lot of stupid people calling their company “bestwebdesigncompany”. Riviera would have been good, but I see .com is taken, and you need a .com (and a .whateverthecountryyouopenthebusinessin)
10. Get good hosting – MediaTemple kind of sucks. We’d pick Rackspace or Hostgator if we’d have to do it again.
11. Fill your company’s free time with internal projects (also known as start-ups or incubator ideas). You never know.
12. Build an amazing portfolio.

Don’t:

1. Build a business plan.
2. Focus on legal stuff just yet (not important when you first start).

A little history
Vuzum was founded in 2008 and we’re now a team of 8, with two offices, one in Spain and one in Romania. It’s going well.

Hope this helps. You can always get in touch by email when you need advice, or plan to collaborate on amazing projects.

Thank u share it. Also useful for me.

I’d say most important pointers have been nicely summed up by earlier posters.

I’d like to add:

- stay away from planning and research; don’t waste your time with business plans (as this is usually more fiction and wishful thinking then reality), your time is your money so don’t waste it - be available to clients; I have been running my own shop for several years and being on both sides of projects (either as employee or employer) and if there’s one thing that clients hate is unresponsive freelancers (and you wouldn’t believe how many of those are out there, even amongst the better paid ones) - take care of your health!

Thanks for your your awesome replies! It’s great to see how many great advices you guys summed up. Thank you!

What about salesmen? From those out there who own a company, do you have anyone dedicated only to selling your services/ products? Or do you design/ develop and get the projects coming in at the same time all by yourself?

theRiviera said
Thanks for your your awesome replies! It’s great to see how many great advices you guys summed up. Thank you! What about salesmen? From those out there who own a company, do you have anyone dedicated only to selling your services/ products? Or do you design/ develop and get the projects coming in at the same time all by yourself?

Don’t do it all yourself.

Very helpful thread. Should be sticky or archived somewhere, valuable advice