Jovan Cicmil's Blog
Why So Many Startups Fail Miserably After Raising Money
June 24, 2021
Roughly 90% of startups fail. This statistic isn’t surprising, but the way many founders lunge into business, you would think that the failure rate is more like 2%.
Having been following the industry for over a decade, I have noticed some patterns — ideas that sound enticing, plausible, or even brilliant. Ideas shiny enough to attract massive investments before crashing into the ground ...
The Best Ways To Find Freelance Clients in 2021
June 9, 2021
The freelance landscape is a constantly shifting one. This is a wonderful thing for adaptable, entrepreneurial people — and freelancers are nothing if not adaptable and entrepreneurial.
Still, some dangers lurk in the mists of this landscape. For instance, it is not beyond imagination that you might find yourself looking for freelance work in an ecosystem that clients have migrated away ...
How to Turn Your Employer Into Your First Customer
June 3, 2021
Imagine this.
You drag yourself out of bed in the morning. It’s a rainy day and your commute to the office is hell. The soundtrack you play in your car doesn’t even come close to drowning out the sound of horns and engines.
By the time you arrive at the office, you are stressed, apathetic, and counting the seconds until you can drive home again in that same rush hour traffic. In the ...
Community-as-a-Service: A Business Model for the 21st Century
May 13, 2021
It’s 2021 and it seems like every software developer in the world is building their own SaaS (software-as-a-service) products. There’s a revolution of bootstrapping your products and building in public. And that’s great.
But, in the background, there’s a different paradigm developing, one not so easily defined and ...
Most Entrepreneurs Fail To Understand Competition
May 10, 2021
How many ventures do you think fail because of infighting?
How many fail because of market changes outside the founders’ control?
How many fail because the product just isn’t good enough?
If I had to venture a guess, I’d say your answer to all the above questions is “many”. Maybe you’ve been a part of one such story.
But have you ever considered how many ventures fail ...
7 Excuses Software Developers Make
May 3, 2021
Fear of responsibility is part of human nature as much as fear of the dark. We software developers are no different.
I have made many excuses in my career, especially early on. Later on, I have heard many excuses from the standpoints of a colleague, team leader, and client.
Here are some of the most common programmer excuses along with a translation from dev-speak into human English and ...
5 Unexpected Indicators of a Great Team Member
April 16, 2021
There’s a never-ending debate around selecting and interviewing candidates. Hire based on experience. Hire based on knowledge. Hire based on education. Hire based on a technical interview.
All these criteria have merits, but have you considered hiring based on whether a person plays chess, or based on how they take a joke?
Here are 5 unexpected ways to identify potential great team ...
The Rise of the Indie Hackers
April 12, 2021
Remember when half of the tech world were startup founders and the other half were aspiring startup founders?
When startups became all the rage, they redefined how new companies are built. Terms such as product-market fit, idea validation, and growth hacking became part of the day-to-day English language. And who could forget the mom test?
The lean startup methodology took over the world, ...
Pricing Freelance Projects: Everything You Need To Know
April 11, 2021
Building a freelance career is unique in that each year can require new skills and new adaptations. One thing that remains constant is the necessity of good pricing.
During almost a decade of freelance work, I have encountered every kind of project — from shifting a website menu item slightly to the left to ...
Six Ways Emotions Can Make You Fail as an Entrepreneur
March 19, 2021
Entrepreneurs talk a lot about common problems: building a product, reaching customers, getting funding, and hiring the right people.
On the other hand, there is little talk about the things going on within the entrepreneur’s own mind that can make or break their plans.
Here are some ways psychology can stand in the way of success. Being prepared for potential problems is half the cure. ...
How I Used Outsourcing To Increase My Freelance Income
February 27, 2021
When you begin working as a freelancer, you can find yourself increasing your earnings steadily every month. However, growth inevitably slows down after some time and, eventually, earnings plateau.
How can a freelancer keep increasing their earnings after they’ve filled up their entire schedule and raised their hourly rate as far as it will go? There are several possibilities, including ...
Should Freelancers Charge Fixed-Price or Hourly?
February 24, 2021
Have you ever undercharged a client? Have you ever had a client complain that you’re overcharging them?
These sorts of disputes are common in the freelance world. Many come down to one simple mistake: charging a fixed price when you should be charging an hourly rate, or vice-versa. The choice should be made for each individual project and based on several variables.
With this in mind, I ...
Test-Driven Development is a Religion
February 15, 2021
If you asked a random person the question “are software developers rational as a whole”, you would very likely get an affirmative response. That response would show ignorance of the periodic pseudo-religious movements within the industry.
One of the current religions is test-driven development. If you write tests after you write the actual code that performs the task at hand, you are now ...
How To Be an Effective Leader in Remote Teams
February 6, 2021
The year 2020 brought about a remote revolution of sorts — whether they wanted to or not, many companies decentralized their operations.
This decentralization exposed some challenges of remote work to the wider public. As someone who has worked in several distributed teams over the course of a decade, I’ve watched even the most competent companies struggle to grasp the new ...
The Only Time I Failed a Tech Interview
February 5, 2021
Recently, I came across my notes from a technical interview I did back in 2017 with a funded tech startup. The interview consisted of a 30-minute video call, followed by a coding assignment that took about 2 hours, and a 30-minute feedback session the following day.
Despite doing well on the call and having a stimulating discussion with their CTO, I did a pretty mediocre job of the coding ...
Five Rules for Taking Your Project From Idea to Deployment
January 26, 2021
How many side projects have you started and then quit? Software developers are always learning new technologies, trying out new things, and building their ideas. They also build teams, launch startups, and create paid products.
However, most developers I have talked to report an abysmal completion rate on their projects. Many have 10 or more unfinished side projects, and most have participated ...
How To Invest in Yourself Like a Growth Company
January 21, 2021
Some of the fastest-growing companies in the world are losing money every year, and yet investors have more and more faith in them each year. The bottom line remains negative, and the stock prices are soaring. Why is that?
It all comes down to why the bottom line is negative. The fastest-growing companies often lose money for years because they’re reinvesting all their profits into better ...
How I Evolved My English Skills as a Non-Native Speaker
January 11, 2021
Have you ever watched a lecture, or read an article, where the author had a lot of knowledge but struggled to express it clearly in English? I’ve personally dropped at least a dozen Youtube tutorials for this reason.
If you’re a non-native speaker thinking about creating content, it can be a daunting prospect. Will native speakers mock you? Will your friends find you pretentious? Will your ...
How I Went From ‘Hello World’ to My First Freelance Client in 1 Month
January 7, 2021
Back in 2011, I was a university graduate with a very foggy look at the future. The field of study that I had chosen at age 18 now seemed like a foolish choice. Even though it was an engineering degree, in my country it resigned me to office work in one of maybe a dozen telecommunications companies.
This is not what I had envisioned when I left high school.
I was lucky enough, however, to ...
The 4 Most Important Lessons I Learned Growing My Business in 2020
December 31, 2020
This was an eventful year for the world, to say the least. For me, it was an echo of the immortal words of Charles Dickens: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the year I started creating content in addition to my regular freelancing work. I wrote close to 40 articles and published my first course on Udemy.
It was also the year of lockdowns, Covid-19, and frustrating ...
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