Is the problem people? Freelancers meet up on 21st August 2024
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 21st August, thirteen freelancers got together in the Battle of Trafalgar pub in Brighton to talk all things tech and freelancing. Here is some of what we talked about:
- Moving a project from Laravel 6 to 11
- Getting paid for estimates/quotes
- Domain records – what to change in DNS when you move website host
- What is the goal of the project you’re making?
- The Birthday Paradox and calculating hashes
- Is the hard bit of your tech business actually people?
- The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
- The Caleb Hammer Financial Audit
- Tutoring for money
- University lecturers who have written “the book” on the topic they teach
- Statistics is the youngest form of Maths
- Driving an EV the length of the UK
Highlight
Is the hard bit of your tech business actually people?
This is perhaps more of a topic for people trying to build their own startup / Software as a Service / tech business than freelancers, although it can come up for clients too.
Sometimes, when you’re building a tech business, the biggest problem you’re going to have is not the technology (which may or may not be tricky to build.) The problem is people.
An example of this is to make a local buying and selling website. There’s chunks of tech work to do, especially in making a smooth to use interface for it that people can pick up and use with no training and the minimum of hints, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is you need both buyers and sellers. People.
People need to be convinced your site is better for them to use than Ebay, or Facebook Marketplace. This is possible, the rise of Vinted and Depop show that, but it takes a lot of advertising and effort to shift people from what they are using now to using your service instead. For a two sided marketplace like a buy/sell site, the problem is doubled (well, really, more than doubled.) You need sellers of goods, they’ll be attracted by a site with lots of potential customers. The customers? They’ll be attracted by there being lots of interesting things to buy from sellers. It’s very hard to attract one without the other.
Having to advertise to sellers and offer them cheap or free deals to attract them to the site so you can then advertise to buyers to come and buy from the sellers is expensive. Fine if you have lots of investment, maybe, but not so good if you’re trying to get off the ground as a small company.
Fourteen years ago I built the MySportstream website with Nigel Gordijk, excellent designer and Farm member at the time. It was a community site for people into sport and the first step in a long plan for the business owners. There was a bunch of tech to do, but nothing too difficult. It was a blogging and photo sharing site, and this was the time before smartphones, so easier to make as no phone apps were required. But, it’s really hard to get a community site off the ground, and growth certainly would have been easier once smartphones were ubiquitous. The owners gave it a good go, but the people side – getting popular enough to be sustainable – was too hard a problem, and they closed down.
Their problem was not the tech (though I do say so myself.) It was the audience and creators, the people side of their business.
When you’re working on your own ideas, or looking at a long term project for a client, if you or they are building a business that relies on people, make sure there’s a good, actionable plan to get the right people using the project. That is far, far harder problem than putting code together.