All throughout my consultancy, my business model was "build it and they will come" and sure enough, for ten years, people kept finding me and hiring me for projects. Well, that's not working any more; the market has moved and I need to find another market and/or business model.
The question is "how?" How do you find something that is both profitable and enjoyable? I've been told by marketers "Pick an industry. Anything. Selling dog food. Dry cleaning. Just pick something and focus on it." That is unsatisfying to me.
I also need to move "up the stack". What I've been doing is selling services (programing, admin, training); basically being a journeyman or, in your terminology, a non-full-time contractor. But what's above me in the stack? What skills or knowledge do I have that others would pay for that don't ential billing by the hour for slinging code or doing maintenance?
And then there's the technical side of it. I'm familiar with what's going on technically (Twitter and Facebook APIs, Google Android, the iPhone, Cloud Computing) but how do you form a business around them? A specific example: I have the docs and understand the Twitter API but what can I do with it? What can I build with it that others will find useful and, even better, pay for?
Suggestions?
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