Ask HN: Planning a new company/agency

5 points by thekillerdev 13 years ago | 8 comments

Hello,

I am a front and back-developer and i am willing to open a new agency to create websites, web/IOS/Facebook apps, and all this sort of jobs. There is already a couple agencies here where i live, but most of them are doing crappy jobs and i am pretty sure my jobs are better than theirs. I married a designer, and she is doing an awesome job, but untill now we are only freelancing, and feeling like we need to make a bigger step, open an agency.

I know a lot of you guys can tell me to wait a bit more, gather a little more money, but i am doing this for (development) for 7 years now and i feel like i need to give a step forward, or else, start a new career.

Well, i have someone who have some money to invest and he is willing to invest in an agency, we just talked a couple times about this, but nothing serious. Now i want to do this, and i was thinking, the first step is to plan everything i need... from computers, to persons to sell my jobs, and i have been planning for a couple months now, but i was wondering, what is the best way to show to this investor the idea? is there any best way to show him?

Some simple word documents with all the info? A couple slideshows showing the idea? well, i am really lost about this part now, could someone help me out here?

Any info needed i will answer in the comments.

Thank you very much.

lasertron 13 years ago |

I'm not a "you have to have a business plan" person at ALL, but working on one for my own startup helped me IMMENSELY in communicating the idea, the value proposition, how we are going to gain users, and how we're going to scale. Because I spent so many hours refining that document--just for my own benefit--I can speak about the inner workings of the business more confidently. It also gave me the chance to anticipate problems and address them before investors or customers could teach me about them the hard way. Obviously, a good business plan (or "business planning document," or "cool-ass outline," whatever verbiage you want to use to describe it) won't save you from a ton of hard lessons to be surmounted, but it gets your head in the game from the onset if you begin with one.

Besides the normal mapping and purpose you should outline, it helps to think of a list of objectives and then detail meaningful, practical ways you are going to achieve those. That's where you ask that investor for help, and bring all the data and numbers you can.

brudgers 13 years ago |

Since you are already engaged in freelancing, then you have the minimum equipment required.

So why are you looking to an investor, when what you need is more clients?

Hiring a professional with a proven track record closing sales in your industry is going to be relatively expensive (as in more than your investor may want to invest). Hiring someone without a proven track record closing deals means that they are less experienced than you.

Good luck.

thekillerdev 13 years ago | |

Actually, that made me think about it. The idea came because i am having problems finding clients (same old story), since i am trying to sell my services for (around) 1k USD and they are finding ridiculously expensive, because there are some others around here doing for a lot cheaper.

brudgers 13 years ago | | |

If you're not price competitive with the low end at $1000 [US] raise your prices.

At $4000 or $10,000 you imply greater value and only need to make a small fraction of the sales in order to generate the same revenue. In addition, you will have more time per project to provide better service.

ig1 13 years ago | | |

Show ROI, demonstrate how what you produce will be more beneficial to their bottom line than what your competitors can produce.

mfarmer 13 years ago |

I saw your post. I am looking for a freelance computer programmer to do the programming for the websites we design.

Skills needed:

HTML / XHTML CSS JavaScript WordPress and similar templates/CMS sites php and asp a plus

Able to work in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, ImageReady, Illustrator

If you are interested please email me at mfarmer@boomkin.com with your resume or work samples and hourly rate.

Best of luck to you.

zeet2020 13 years ago |

investor are mostly interested if the idea is working, so i would suggest you start implementing the idea as your in flow your will get more idea about resources you will be needing to implement and running it. which will help you put together a better proposal to the investor and your will get a better prospective whether or not the idea will work.

Kliment 13 years ago |

Take all your data with you, and go talk to him. Don't just send a pile of stuff over.