[CLUE-Talk] interesting home business article - from slashdot

[G. Richard Raab]

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On Friday 25 July 2003 07:32 pm, psychoi3oy at linkline.com wrote:
> i'll skip the slashdot summary but this ->
> http://homepage.mac.com/monickels/techjob.html  is an interesting article
> for small business/home user tech support. being currently out of a job and
> not the guru most companys want (how in the world can i have 4 years
> windows XP experience? or 5 years experience and a bachelor's, i'm only 22
> for peets sake) this actually sounds like an interesting job opportunity.
> my biggest problem is initial capital (business cards, flyers, tools,
> software perhaps) and the fact that i have next to no business sense. i
> cave in too easily when it comes to people whining about something costing
> too much, i'm perhaps a little too customer satisfaction oriented (a habit
> i picked up working at an oldschool service station, doing full serve gas,
> etc) and fear that i'd be too nice for my own pocketbook's good. but if i
> could do this kind of work, even part time, i'm sure i could make money at
> it and i'd just cringe when it came time for taxes (i remember my mom
> pouring over pages of tax stuff when it came time for her to deduct stuff
> from her home daycare business, and i can't stand reading mindless tax
> drivel). based on the article and what you all know about the climate in
> denver (something i'm sorely unaware of having only been here 3 weeks)
> would this be a good thing to look into? or should i shrug and keep hitting
> monster.com and hope for the best there?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>    Evan Widger
>    Psychoi3oy at linkline.com (you can email me personally if you feel it'd
> keep the mailing list clutter free)
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CLUE TIME:
	Just a couple of days ago, a thread was complaining about jobs disappearing. 
At that time, I responded back by saying that you should forget about the 
high paying "employment" jobs, and start your own company using your tech 
skills. That article was more of exactly what I was saying. The jobs will be 
gone exp if you do not have a 4 year CS degree. period. end of story.  a CIS 
degree or MCSE are absolutly worthless. Personally, I do not trust a person 
with either,  as it suggest that they like shortcuts and are afraid of having 
to work (I can't do math; the CS background is too geeky; the CS program did 
not teach MS; etc).
In fact, that is simply an entry point. It may not be enough, if you are not 
good. So what do you do? you can cry about it,  go back to school, or work on 
a start-up. For the 4 months that I was unemployed (last fall), I worked 40 
hours/week on job location and 40 hours/week on a start-up. Having come from 
another start-up that I started with 20K in my bank account, but ended 50K in 
debt, I find it hard to do it again. But there really is no other choice.  In 
Jan, I was lucky to get a job via a friend (very lucky), but they wanted 
somebody with distributed networking, OO, perl, postgres, X11, cgi, kernel 
hacking, and security (hard combo to come by). Fortunatly, I have done all 
that, so I got the job. But in the mean time, I am continueing working on 2 
other start-ups. The 1'st of these should make ~ 100K- 150K next week in 
revenue. And this is simply selling diskless linux systems with good support. 
In fact, excellent customer support. If you don't have good support, you will 
die on the grape vine. 
Suggestions;

1) keep your excellent customer support. It will pay. just charge for it. If 
you screw up then do not charge, but if customers mistake, charge for it.

2) Make sure that you have a marketing/sales person on board. In fact several 
will go further. If you are not capable of doing it, then do not pretend that 
you can. Simply partner up with somebody who can. My start-up has basically 3 
marketing/sales (2 whom either regard them selves as technical or are 
learning) and 1 real tech (me). Do not partner up with somebody who does not 
want to do sales, but will do it for the moment. They (and you) will fail, 
miserably.

3) Build at least a mini buisness plan. Target someplace and stick with for 
the most part. If you find an interesting twist that will not take you  too 
far off course, then you can try it. We were doing wireless for restaurants 
and found a very interesting market. One that is totally begging for low-cost 
equipment and support. We 1/3 of what our rivals charge  for support. the 
difference is that they have MS systems in place where we push diskless 
Linux.  We get no calls on the Linux side at all for help. The MS side is 
costing us big. In fact, I am thinking of chargeing the same price as our 
rivals for MS support just to encourage everybody to switch.

4) contacts count. Nurse them.

5) Your reputation is important.

6) contacts count. Do I really need to repeat it again?

- -- 
cheers
g.r.r.
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