Think like a startup

Last Update: 17.08.2018. By Jens in Newsletter

I think there are many parallels between a startup and a single dev career. We can learn a lot from the startup world and apply it to our own business or career. Take the first step every startup takes. Choosing an audience. The audience is the people actually buy from the startup. Replace buy now with hiring you and you got the career equivalent.

Same with many of the marketing tactics. I recently bought the Traction book in which they explain 19 channels a startup can try to get off of the ground (or read this article). Most of those you can apply for a new job too like speaking for example. Go to Meetups and do a talk about your thing, whatever this is. It takes time. And courage. But eventually, you will get traction and move forward.

If not, you can do the same as startups and pivot. Most of them never started out with the thing they do now. Or the same audience. Yet, testing takes some time. Like weeks or month. In terms of speaking probably months until something happens for you.

Before going out though, define the ideal employer for you aka your audience. What defines them? Are they in a specific industry? Share a common problem you like to fix? Are there problems you love to solve? Don’t think code here. Noone wants code for codes’ sake, they want a solution to a problem. Fix that problem or help them with fixing it.

Think outside the dev box for getting aways of being code monkey no. 50.