You know what one of the most common causes of failure is for software projects? You don’t have a plan. Unlike building with more solid materials in construction, you can start making software before you know what the hell you are doing. Writing a program roadmap helps you make decisions earlier when they cheaper, and […]
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One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create more valuable content in the coming year. In addition to my annual post-mortem, I wanted to share some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned throughout the year so that you can apply them to your own bootstrapped or creative service business.
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Getting clients as a freelancer is like a catch-22 problem. If you ask other freelancers how they find clients, they typically say “word of mouth” or “referrals.” How are you supposed to get referrals without previous work? Getting started seems impossible. If you are thinking about starting a freelance business, you need to be proactive […]
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I hate playing the back-and-forth “what times works for you?” game when it comes time to book a meeting. As a one-person shop, I’d rather spend my time providing value to clients and taking care of more important matters than spend time negotiating appointment times. I use Calendly to make booking appointments easier. I can […]
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Want to keep your list high quality and remove people who aren’t opening your emails? Here’s an automation rule I got from Kurt Elster and Philip Morgan that can do just that:
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You probably have different methods of adding users to your list. Or maybe you are testing whether or not asking for a first name affects conversion rates. Either way, there are situations when you want to use the first name if you have it and have a fallback if you don’t. Here’s a quick code […]
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The Problem Wagglez came to us with a vision for a local discovery and coupon app that helps travelers in new cities find the places that locals love best. They were in a time crunch to launch, and needed someone who could come in and quickly coordinate with a young development team.
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The Problem For Tangent Solutions, a growing software products company, the biggest hurdle they faced was a lag time between contracts. Due to the scale of software and complexity in orchestrating development teams, software products often encountered problems like going over budget and missing target deadlines. They needed a solution that made complex estimates more […]
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The Problem Network storage company Coraid powers some of the most renowned enterprises. They were bringing a new product to market that needed some finishing touches to the website front-end and performance. They needed a creative development crew that could transform their existing interface into an easier to use, cleaner tool to help monitor server […]
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The Goal The founders of Borrowing Magnolia wanted to help the modern bride plan her dream wedding on a budget. They also knew of many newlyweds had dresses that would sit in the closet collecting dust for years to come. They wanted to help people turn their old dresses into an asset, and help brides […]
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If you are using Drip for your marketing automation, you might want to change the copy on the “Confirm Your Subscription” Link that gets sent when people fill out a form. This link is an important call-to-action, and this little piece of text can have a big impact on your subscription conversion rate. Drip doesn’t […]
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One part of the freelancing puzzle I haven’t solved yet is keeping cash flow stable. Here’s a lifetime graph of my revenue, month, by month: There’s a lot of peaks and valleys. Good clients, bad clients, late payments, upfront payments. Sales slumps. Family emergencies. It’s all there. About a year after I became a freelancer, […]
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I just got back from the first annual Double Your Freelancing Conference, and I haven’t felt this exhausted and excited in some time. I met so many great people and listened to informative talks by some brilliant speakers. Instead of getting into individual tactics and strategies, I thought it’d be more beneficial to you to […]
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Patrick McKenzie(@patio11, founder of starfighters.io) Just shared a buffet of bite-size career advice for software developers on Twitter.It’s too valuable to let it become lost as it floats away down the Twitter steam, so I’ve preserved it here for future reference and top-to-bottom reading.
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It takes us 3.65 hours to design and implement a contact form. I used to work for a web agency that wrote fixed quotes based on hourly estimates. When a member of the sales team is on a call, they are going to have to face a common question from clients at some point:
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People have probably told you that two things every business should be doing is generating content and building a list. The problem with this advice is that it usually comes wit no “how” or a “why”. Writing content as a marketing strategy is a slow burn with abstract benefits. But a solid strategy can bring […]
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Metaprogramming is one of the unique features of Ruby. Metaprogramming is an interesting concept, and a tool can save a lot of time. It can also be confusing for developers and difficult to maintain if not used properly. Here is an example of how I used Metaprogramming to solve a real-world problem and save a […]
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All businesses are inherently risky. Human beings are terrible at understanding and quantifying risk. Since most entrepreneurs tend to be human beings, this causes problems. Without having a clear picture of what risk is, how to identify it, and how to quantify it, making correct decisions about your business can be hard. The biggest cognitive […]
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Launching a new product can induce a lot of anxiety. If you have been working on your product for some time, it is easy to let the fear of uncertainty about public reaction take over. You might decide to push the launch the back until you can one feature a bit better, a part of […]
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When building client-side applications, your URLs are prepended with a hash. Removing this can make your routes more user-friendly and more easily crawled by search engines. Here is how you can remove the hash from your routes in an Angular app built on Ruby on Rails, and use the standard URL structure.
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It seems like these days everyone wants to build a software as a service app. The siren’s call of monthly recurring revenue is hard to ignore. SaaS products are a complex undertaking. I’ve worked on them before and seen how all the moving parts have to interact. There are plenty of SaaS Development tools, libraries, […]
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These are notes and links from a presentation I gave to the Developers of Athens on testing client-side applications.
Continue readingEvery Year I take a look back at my business, and do the same exercise I do with every client project: a postmortem. I ask myself 3 questions: What went well? What went wrong? What steps should I take in the future? This is a valuable writing exercise, and I’d strongly encourage you to do […]
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And 5 Tips to Improve Each One The end of the year will be here soon. It’s a time to reflect on how the past year went, and plan for the next year. Three numbers determine your bottom line. By understanding these numbers, you will know what metrics you need to move to get the […]
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I recently read an article entitled five ways to build a $100 million dollar business. It discusses different business models that vary in the number and size of your customer base. Some businesses work with a few enterprise scale clients while others work with a larger number of smaller customers. Patrick Mackenzie mentioned on Twitter […]
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In a previous article about Yeoman, AngularJS, and Foundation, I talked about setting up a complete front-end scaffold with Yeoman, AngularJS, and Foundation. Now I want to look at how to test the AngularJS part of your application.
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With the combination of modern browsers and mobile devices having support for HTML5, CSS3, and new JavaScript APIs, front end development has become a lot more complicated, but also exciting. There has been an explosion of tools as of late, and it can be daunting to know where to get started. Here are the tools […]
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The 3 Tiered Approach That Closes More Sales When a freelancer submits a proposal, they will often only include one offer. They will set the deliverable, and the price, and throw their proposal over the wall. When you do this, you give the client a binary option: Hire you or don’t. By giving the client […]
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My Email Marketing Strategy In a Nutshell Email marketing converts better than social media or content marketing. Nathan Barry has a great write up with the numbers. You can build a list by giving people incentives in exchange for their email address, reaching out to them directly, or offering people updates on an as-yet-unreleased new […]
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When I left my job to become a freelance programmer, I was charging $50/hr in the beginning. I met other freelancers, consultants, and agencies in town, and a few of them charged $150/hr. Even the agency that I had worked at previously billed my time at $120/hr, which means that my level of programming […]
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Concerns are a new feature that was added in Rails 4. They allow to clean up the code in your models and controllers. They also allow you to share functionality between models or controllers. However, they can be a bit tricky to test in isolation. In this article, I want to show how you can […]
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There is amazing amount of resource available on the internet if you know where to look. I’ve realized that over the past year, there are some articles, pod casts, books, or videos that have had a huge impact on my view and approach to my business. I’ve had several people ask me how I came […]
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AngularJS is a JavaScript framework made by Google for building complex client-side applications. Angular’s killer feature is ‘directives’ that allow you to extend HTML by creating tags and attributes. Angular projects have a somewhat different structure than other JavaScript MVC frameworks, but it can be highly modular and easy to maintain once you understand the […]
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Building a command line interface into your application can be a way to add extra utility to your application. Adding cron jobs (a.k.a. scheduled tasks) to your CodeIgniter application can provide additional utility. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up both in a CodeIgniter application by writing a simple appointment reminder, which […]
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Regular expressions are a tough cookie for most programmers to figure out. They are terrifying to look at with their daunting syntax. There is also nothing quite like regular expressions anywhere in programming. Programmers may learn to hack together basic regex expressions, or how to cut and paste some they find online for their needs, […]
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In this article, I’d like to walk you through my first few steps when setting up a new CodeIgniter Project: – Setting up a way to render pages in a layout – Setting up a way to easily handle assets (CSS & JavaScript files).
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