Contrary to popular belief, becoming your own client isn’t always easy (or fun, or logical, etc.) And as a co-owner of a busy development shop, I can tell you firsthand that launching your own venture is no less a gamble than paying someone else to build it – the capital you save typically ends up equaling the opportunity you lose.
That doesn’t mean it can’t work. Developers launch apps and ideas all the time, and the current [Web 2.0] excitement is only making this more common. But launching a successful, revenue-generating venture from inside a successful, revenue-generating development firm is far less common.
As always, I’m posting based on personal experience, some good, some bad. At ep, we’ve launched a number of sites and apps [for ourselves] over the years, and I’d be the first to tell you some have failed.
What we’re learning is that the more you treat your own venture like an outside client, the higher the rate of success.
We have three tangent ventures that are top of mind for us right now. Of these, only one can truly be considered independently successful. We’re looking to change that, of course, but the reason one is performing more successfully than the others is that we’ve always treated it as an outside client. We hold ourselves to strict development deadlines, we handle support requirements immediately, and we get pissed at it if it isn’t paying.
In other words, we hold this particular venture accountable as a business, and we don’t subsidize it with revenue from another business (like our development firm.)
Like most things for me, the general wisdom wasn’t something I came up with. We have an outside partner in this particular venture, so the need was easy to spot.
We’ve begun forcing accountability on all of our big ideas, treating ourselves as clients. And, like I posted earlier, we aren’t afraid to fire a client that doesn’t perform.