The Beginning of a Beautiful Friend$hip

2.5 months into my time at Slant and along comes a…

I had been working at Slant for two and a half months and, still feeling a bit new, I thought I needed to bring in a lot more contract work than I was currently responsible for. At the time, I had completed a few interesting and intense projects for a regular client of ours, but beyond that I hadn’t pulled in anything significant.

Also, I was way over budget on the iBeacon project and thinking to myself that I was losing money for the company. So, my head was running ever so valiantly towards worry that I wasn’t valuable enough. Then, all of a sudden along comes a torrential downpour of new work. Hallelujah!

A CTO, 4 Programmers and an NDA

I get an email that says the client is looking to hire a CTO and four programmers, but to know more about it I need to sign an NDA. Piece of cake. I sign it, send it back, and we line up an introduction to the concept and the state of affairs for the project. We were really intrigued, we knew next to nothing about the project, had no idea how to handle such a large commitment, and were extremely excited to be able to have the opportunity to pitch.

Personally, I was already starting to do the math: if we hired a couple of people to fill in the developer positions we’d be able to bill my services plus profit off the junior developers we would hire… And, if we were able to sweet talk them any further then we’d be able to take on the design work as well!!!

Proposal

After a long introductory meeting we all sat down and talked out the possibilities of this new opportunity. We were all pretty jazzed about it and we set off on pulling together a slick proposal for the project. First contact with the client was on the 4th, we signed and sent back the confidentiality agreement before the weekend and four days later had our first concept meeting. A day later I had written a thorough proposal and sent it back.

I extremely grateful for the opportunity to submit a proposal for the position of Chief Technology Officer for this exciting project. This proposal seeks to be as thorough as possible with the information we received from our discussions in the last week.

I have tried to outline a vision for a plan that will be successful in the coming months, especially under the timelines that have already been defined. I have laid out my approach for putting together a solid development team to complement the expert team already in place at The Company.

Though this proposal is focused on X to be run at the end of September, I would like to acknowledge that much of what you will read has been thought out in terms of the larger scope of The Company as well as The Future Business.

Thank you for your consideration of this proposal. If after you have reviewed it you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at any time.

I really put forth my best effort on this proposal. I and the other partners at Slant had a good couple of meetings to go over the details of the conversation I had with the client. There were some very concrete things like a deadline at the end of September for a first launch. There were some very vague things like what they wanted built by that time. Taking into consideration everything we talked about, including the weak “mockup” document they provided, I was able to pull a proposal together that outlined an approach to making the first launch happen. It listed a few things:

1. I would act as CTO but remain employed by Slant.
2. We would be able to pull of app development, web development and backend development with three people instead of the proposed five.
3. The Slant personnel would bill out at regular rates, and the subcontractor would bill out at a reduced rate.
4. We would build a cross-platform application, a cross-platform website and a backend service to handle the app and its users.
5. We would work directly with the design and marketing teams already in place for the project.

The proposal was as thorough as possible. We pitched for our full rates and crossed our fingers.

Feedback

A few days later they called us back to let us know that we were the most expensive option they received. But…

We got the contract!!

Seriously.

We were ecstatic!!

At the time, we were taking reduced salaries so that our efforts and billings would contribute more directly to the stability and security of the company. And, with a successful first MVP we’d be in the perfect position to continue this project for a long time to come.

The client had looked at a bunch of other proposals and still went with ours despite the high cost. To us this signaled that they saw the right fit with our approach and that they wanted an excellent product. Moreover, they had an eye for quality and longer-term vision.

Perfect.

This was clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship!