Serialclients
It was a rather unconscious decision to do a whole series of about-clients-stories. In fact, I hadn't even noticed that I had done just that. I was using the blog-features of Textmate to post to my blog, and if I went through my articles again at all it was via Bloglines, so I really couldn't see the series develop. It's interesting to see though what's obviously the biggest issue when launching an enterprise. It's the clients. It's how to find clients, how to make them trust you, how to make them understand the advantages of your product, how to make them value quality more than cheap&dirty-hacks, how to make them understand why they can't have their way if they want a decent product (because what they have in mind is no good at all), what to put into a contract so you can still have a life and actually earn some money, how to deal with your client in a general manner (what a client expects is sometimes far from what would be logical), etc., etc.
During the past few months we've certainly learned a lot, but it wasn't so much fun at times. I wish we could have avoided one error or the other.
The latter wouldn't have been impossible, I think, if only all the business-stuff we're told at university didn't suck so much. In our study programme we have to do quite a lot of business/economics-related subjects. But instead of telling us about how to get a company going (in a real sense, not the "Once you have your many thousand Euros together, decide about who's going to be your CEO and start renting offices and hiring employees"-kind-of-sense), how to find clients, how to deal with clients, what's expected, what's necessary and what's avoidable, we're told lots of things that simple aren't applicable. They're either too theoretic, or too simplistic. It helps of course too have a general understanding of things so that when you delegate that kind of jobs to specialists you can still understand what they're doing - but here we need to learn things by heart that we'll have forgotten 3 days after the exam, but we're never told about basic real-world stuff.
I'm totally aware of the necessity of finding your own way of doing things, and making your vision of things what makes the company tick. But I still think a hands-on-course about the basics of starting up would have helped (wheres I can't see myself EVER applying the stuff we were actually told about in the courses we had).
During the past few months we've certainly learned a lot, but it wasn't so much fun at times. I wish we could have avoided one error or the other.
The latter wouldn't have been impossible, I think, if only all the business-stuff we're told at university didn't suck so much. In our study programme we have to do quite a lot of business/economics-related subjects. But instead of telling us about how to get a company going (in a real sense, not the "Once you have your many thousand Euros together, decide about who's going to be your CEO and start renting offices and hiring employees"-kind-of-sense), how to find clients, how to deal with clients, what's expected, what's necessary and what's avoidable, we're told lots of things that simple aren't applicable. They're either too theoretic, or too simplistic. It helps of course too have a general understanding of things so that when you delegate that kind of jobs to specialists you can still understand what they're doing - but here we need to learn things by heart that we'll have forgotten 3 days after the exam, but we're never told about basic real-world stuff.
I'm totally aware of the necessity of finding your own way of doing things, and making your vision of things what makes the company tick. But I still think a hands-on-course about the basics of starting up would have helped (wheres I can't see myself EVER applying the stuff we were actually told about in the courses we had).
