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Ask HN: I built a small software dev agency, what should I do next?

2 points by apatters ↗ HN
Reaching out to the HN community to get some fresh perspectives. Over the past several years of my life I've built a software development agency with $XX,XXX monthly revenue in a very "boring" industry -- it mainly boils down to building WordPress themes and plugins. (I don't find this boring, but it's not some hot sexy speculative thing that the media is gushing over and VCs are throwing money at.)

We have a couple people on payroll and three long-term anchor clients who pay the bills.

It all began with a few years of grit, pain and poverty grinding out projects on Elance -- an experience I'm reluctant to repeat (and which might be even harder these days).

But when I started looking at ways we could grow I realized I didn't know the first thing about marketing, sales and outreach. I thought a productized, done-for-you small business website might be easier to sell than our current service (easy to paint a value proposition, thousands of small business starting up all the time), and we got started on that, but I realized pretty quickly I don't know how to sell that, either.

What should I do next? Figure out how to market this product? Find a sales guy/cofounder who can help? Start from scratch because it's a bad idea? Turn my attention back to our corporate retainer business and figure out how to get more of those?

1 comment

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Vanderson
I just went through YC's Startup School [SUS] [0], the video/lessons alone are pure gold for software companies. I have had a couple employees in the past and I have had 2 different business coaches and took a business course, but the YC's view is very software centric and gave me a new perspective on how to move my business forward that none of my other training/education helped me with.

That being said, our businesses may have some overlap [1]. I risk putting a link to my business here, but in SUS they hammer it into your head that if you aren't embarrassed about some aspect of your product you launched too late. (also, forgive me as this feels a little like a shameless plug)

Email me info at archetype.media, I may have some ideas where you can move forward depending on what kind of focus you have. Also, I have a few resellers that have various industry focuses that may overlap with your interests as well.

Also, I wouldn't mind getting some advice back from you on how you grew your business.

[0] https://www.startupschool.org/latest

[1] https://www.startupschool.org/companies/archetype , https://www.archetypewebsites.com/