8 things I have learned founding a Web Agency
When I founded BigThink.it, my own Web Agency, I was a 23 years old eager boy with no experience on managing a Company. Nevertheless, I started my adventure (and I made a lot of errors, of course!).
Now, after almost 6 years, I want to share what I have learned.
1. Don’t do it alone
Believe me: you won’t go too far alone.
You have amazing skills, no doubts about it, but working with someone else can enhance a lot your work:
- You can expand your provision of services.
- You have another point of view: the best hints always come from a discussion.
- You are more focused and motivated.
2. Pick the right co-founders
Starting a new Company or Startup with someone is like a marriage. You wouldn’t marry a woman you don’t really know, right? The same here: build a business only with people you trust and know for years.
Make sure to choose them close to you in terms of objectives, thinking and even life style. People too different from you will potentially create troubles sooner or later.
Great minds think alike.
Furthermore, don’t partner with too busy people, involved in too much other businesses. They cannot be focused on your project and you’ll end up as another startup in their collection. So, be clear right away about what their responsibilities will be and what you expect from them.
And remember: if you decide to divorce, it won’t be costless nor painless.
3. Pick the right collaborators
A Company is built not only by its founders, but also by an awesome Team: if you are going to open a Web Agency, you will need web developers and designers.
My suggestion is to start lean: working with freelances will help you to cut costs and pay them as you go. If you are having an hard time, you won’t find yourself paying your employees for doing nothing.
By the way, finding the right collaborators isn’t easy at all. You will change a lot of developers, testing them with little projects. It could take months before you have a stable team, but keep looking until your are satisfied!
4. Do you really need an office?
One of the advantages of working with a remote team is that you can save on the environment. You can work from everywhere you are comfortable if your collaborators are distributed, with no need of an office!
Even if you have employees physically present, consider to join a co-working space: in addition to entering a network, you will save on office costs, cleaning, etc.
Again: start lean! Why bind yourself to an annual rental agreement, when you can pay and cancel monthly, according on how your business is going?
5. Set working guidelines
Be careful: having different developers working alone on different projects can be really a mess. And if everyone has their own style, his own programming language or framework… good luck! You will end up with a Babel of projects that can be followed only by the person who started them.
So, make sure they all work in the same way:
- Share with them a list of predefined guidelines and tips.
- Make them using the same technologies (and development frameworks).
- Make them sharing problems and solutions.
- Make them working on the same projects, as far as you can.
6. Don’t reinvent the wheel
If all of your customers want similar projects (websites, contests, landing pages…), don’t start always from scratch! Take your time for developing a single customizable product, instead of working on different projects every time.
In BigThink.it, after many customers started asking for similar Facebook contests, we developed an internal API for creating contests, since the requirements were always the same. We were able to reduce our development time from one month to 1–2 weeks.
7. Keep an eye on what’s happening inside your Company
Know at any time what your collaborators are doing. You can keep track and monitor them using a lot of tools, for example:
8. Keep an eye on where you are going to
Never proceed head down, without stopping for a moment to look back and evaluating your work.
Remember sometimes to raise your head and keep an eye on where your Company is going. Is it on the right way? Have you achieved the objectives you have set? What can you do to improve them?
Just don’t be overwhelmed by the contingencies. Be always on.
That’s what I have learned and I hope you will not do the same errors. If I can go back in time, I would do things differently, of course.
However I am quite bored in developing projects for customers and I have started my own startup: Musikee.
I’m trying to follow my own advices in that and I think I’m doing quite well, at least in that 8 points. I’m sure I’m committing other errors that may be the content of future posts.
But you can’t learn if you don’t make mistakes, right?
