The freak out (Part 1/3)

You’ve decided to start your own freelance developer business.

First off, that’s awesome.

Second, have you started to freak out yet?

The Freak Out

I’m asking because I know I freaked out when I first got started.

I bought all of the books even remotely related to freelancing. Read them all.

And proceeded to feel overwhelmed.

Back in 2007 there wasn’t that much information for freelancing developers.

There were books are starting a new business. Some on starting a service business. Some on doing a web design business.

But nothing for freelance developers. The only software business books were for product companies, not service companies.

I tried to pick out the best parts from each book. What would I really need and what could I ignore?

As you might expect, this led to a Frankenstein of a plan. I had a business plan with 5-year projections and an MBA-esque strategy outline.

And no idea how to find customers.

Oh sure, I thought I knew what I was doing at first. But as I got started I saw how fragile my plans really were.

But that’s me. I’d rather over-plan and throw away parts of the plan than to under-plan and not know what I’m doing.

So where was I? Oh yeah, the freak out.

You’ve probably already had one or are sneaking up on one. It happens to everyone, some earlier than others.

What causes the freak out

Everyone’s freak out is different too. Some people just get this feeling. An unease. They know something is wrong but can’t pinpoint it. But it’s just a small feeling and they can muscle right over it.

Other people (me) get completely paralyzed by the freak out. Everything is going smoothly and BAM. 100% complete stop. Worry, stress, anger, and all of the other bad emotions. Not fun.

Looking back one of the causes of my freak out was the sheer number of decisions I had to make. And the sheer complexity of them.

Most people can handle a few decisions. But throw the kinds of decisions about starting a business at them and they buckle.

Not only are there hundreds (thousands) of decisions but…

each decision affects other decisions and choices you’ve already made…

and there is no clear answer if you made the right decision.

As a developer, you’re used to complexity and interrelated ideas. If you change how you’re loading data, that will affect how you search it, which will affect performance. We’re good at this. What-If is a standard question for us.

But we’re also used to near-instant feedback on our decisions. If we add an algorithm, we can see immediately that it’s 10x slower. Or that the fix we created doesn’t completely kill the bug.

With business and marketing, feedback can take weeks or months. If you get it at all.

Most of my development career I’ve used iterative development and test-driven-development. At the core of both of these are fast feedback cycles. You can do less planning upfront because you’ll be able to make corrections quickly.

They both fail when the feedback cycles take too long. A 30 minute build and test process will slow you down and you force you to make everything perfect before you act.

If you try to take an iterative approach to starting your business (like I did), you’ll start with a bunch of ideas, do them (like me), and see what kind of feedback you get.

But what if this feedback doesn’t come fast enough. Then you’re stuck doing a bunch of things that you don’t know if they’ll work or not.

(I believe the technical term for this is “spinning your wheels”)

This uncertainty starts the freak out. Are you doing the right things? Should you try something else? Should you wait?

This is important to remember:

The freak out is related to how much uncertainty you have.

So how do you reduce or eliminate that uncertainty?

Eric Davis

Ready for Part 2? Here you go. Enjoy.