Information Technology startup

#1

Hi, I’m actually in midst of starting my own IT company. Any advice? Where did you start? What is the biggest hurdle? How were you able to gain clients/contracts as a smaller company? It would be great to get your advice on things to increase my success. Thanks :blush:

Any suggested resources would be great too Any suggested resources would be great too

#2

Hey @rrb2v!

Congrats on starting a company! That’s a big/scary step and you have a lot of hard work in front of you!

I think my very first client was a company my mom was working for… they needed some website help, and I pitched them and got a small job. My second client was one of my first client’s customers. I was referred. My third client was a former landlord of mine. I basically made them a website, then emailed it to them unprompted. They didn’t respond to the email, so I nervously called them on the phone then eventually made the sale.

There’s no exact playbook, but it’s a lot of hustle and working through a lot of "no"s.

It’s hard to give too much specific advice to general “how to start a company” kind of questions, but here’s the two things that I think matter most when you’re starting/growing a company:

  1. Persistence. Your company will never go out of business until you give up. And the non-stop, never ending persistence is necessary to battle through slow days, slow weeks, rejections, building a brand, building a client base, growing revenue, expanding, etc, etc. You just have to keep pushing.
  2. Continuous Improvement. Remember to always be improving. Make your product better. Make your company better. Make you better. Read. Take forward steps. Remember to always spend time in Quadrant II.

If you combine those two things, over time you’ve painted yourself into a corner. There’s nowhere else to go but success. If you keep improving every day and never stop, there’s no other alternative. But it will seem like a long dark road at the beginning with no guarantee of where you’ll come out. If it was easy, everyone would do it. :slight_smile:

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