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by mooreds 1887 days ago
> What are our alternatives?

referrals, referrals, referrals. Always be asking if anyone knows anyone needing your help.

Also, consider productized consulting.

At the least, consider hosting, that can be a good way to make money while you sleep. Also makes you more of a one-stop shop, which can be appealing to clients.
1 comments
noobrunner 1887 days ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by productized consulting and hosting? Thanks
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mooreds 1886 days ago
Productized consulting is where you take what your consulting does and turn it into a repeatable product. Some links:

https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/3-great-examples-of-produc...

https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/scaling-services (writing)

The goal would be to find something that you offer that you can make repeatable. You didn't talk much about the services you offer (other than the fact they are 'dev services'), but some examples for a dev shop might be:

   * architecture review
   * seo analysis (if you do webdev)
   * accessibility survey (if you have the skills/desire)
   * disaster recovery audit
All of these are tasks you can put a single price on, that you can turn into a process, and that have value to the customer disassociated from the hours used to deliver it. That means the first one might take longer, but you can start to optimize the process and therefore make more profit.

As far as hosting, if you build applications, you can offer hosting of those applications. Even if you are building on a cloud or PaaS (like firebase or heroku) you can still offer to manage applications over time. This would include doing things like setting up alerting, handling dependency upgrades, and managing the cloud or PaaS provider.

The value to clients when you do this is that they don't have to set up and manage their own hosting. Since you built the application, you probably know how to run it pretty well too. This can be recurring revenue that you don't have to work for, since you can charge a monthly fee.

There are some downsides of offering hosting/managed services. Depending on client needs you may need to carry a pager, which some employees may balk at. When sites are down, it is super stressful. But it can be recurring revenue and you have a ready set list of people to offer it to: anyone you build something for.

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