I'm also finishing Atlas Shrugged finally this week, having just finished The Fountainhead. Next on my list is Anthem, then I think I'll go back to some non-fiction for the next couple books... like Outliers and Capital and Freedom.
This looks really cool, I would definitely be one of your target market if I still worked at my job (which I quit half a year ago to focus on my own startup). I now use Apple iWork 09 almost exclusively, so as soon as you come out with a Numbers version, please let us know!
This really isn't a tough market to get into, as long as you have the experience and portfolio to back up your skills. As many people as are in it right now, the market is still booming. I do a lot of sub-contracting (I'm better at B2B sales than B2C), and one of the biggest problems I see isn't getting new clients, it's finding the developers to do the work.
1. Have a strong portfolio (or build one if you don't have one already).
2. Meet people. Go to networking business events in your area. Volunteer to speak/present at events and expert panels on marketing and web design.
3. It's a numbers game. The more people you send your resume/portfolio to, the better your chances of finding something worthwhile. Subscribe to RSS feeds for industry-specific job boards, read your local papers for potential opportunities with new companies, etc. You may even finding yourself developing software that automates this entire process to allow you to spend your time working instead of lining up new work. That's what I did anyway ;-)
I am in a very similar situation as you are. We have a very niche product that we sell to higher-ed. We sell it as a subscription model, which we allow them to pay X years upfront with a contract so that it more closely resembles a fixed-cost product to better fit their budgets.
As far as cold-calling goes, it really isn't worth it in this industry. The low conversion combined with the insanely long sales cycles just isn't right for a cold-call approach. That said, we've modified the cold-call approach by setting up Google Alerts for phrases which indicate a university that is ripe with need for our product, and then send them direct product information tailored to their specific needs.
We've also developed some internal software that helps automate this process. It has worked very well for us so far.
I would be very interested in talking with you further, as it seems we share a common market with common obstacles. Please feel free to shoot me an email.
Agreed that personal contacts and relationships are your best bet.
Beyond that, we use Google Alerts to RSS feed + LeadNuke for a continuous stream of new client leads. (disclosure: I developed LeadNuke expressly for this purpose)
Make sure to submit it Friday afternoon/early evening :)
EDIT: I checked out leadnuke; it seems super useful. Almost like a "read later" for leads.
I also like that you DIDN'T add fancy HTML emails or anything, because that would ruin the impersonal nature of it and cause people to ignore you because an email looked too fancy or spammy (or whatever).
Please submit leadnuke again as it matures, I'd love to hear more. Also it would be nice if you added your email to your profile, especially since your email is not found on your sites (from a quick search).
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely be sure to resubmit it down the road on a Friday afternoon (I also have to remember to keep in mind the time difference between me [EST] and the vast majority of Hacker Newsers).
And, yes, that is exactly why it doesn't do HTML emails. I've personally never liked them and always applauded Facebook for its text-only emails.
Not sure why my email isn't showing up though, it should be there and it shows up when I go to edit my profile.
This is great. I have already setup my couple-page-long capistrano scripts to setup my slices, but this would have definitely prevented me from needing to do that.
I'd also like to see a munin package install (with Rails-specific plugins). Does this use Passenger for Rails installation?
I built a predictive model for finding the maximum temperatures of the core components of heavy-duty alternators, which cut the alternator testing cycle for the biggest Tier 1 automotive supplier in the world down from 3 months to about a day and a half. Two PhD's had been trying for 2 years before me to accomplish this. It was meant to be an educational exercise, but last I heard, they were still using it to get new business.
