Three Mistakes I made as a developer that hurt me when i remember

Looking back at my journey as a developer and co-founder of a Design agency in Lagos, there are a few things i would do differently if i had the opportunity to start over.

These are some of my experiences:

I lost a client because my asking price was too low: Starting out about four years ago as a new developer straight out of dev school, we (my partner and I) believed we needed to attract clients by offering ‘discounts’. We reduced our price a little lower than industry standard. It worked. We got the clients, we did the job and we got the cash.

As we began to grow however, we found it difficult to get jobs outside the bracket fee we started with. We had settled in our mind the fee we believed a client should pay and that affected our marketing until we met our first client who was willing to pay way more. We lost the client when we gave our asking price. After much follow up to inquire the reason the client dragged her feet, she finally opened up that she was consigned she would not get a quality work because our asking price was too low. Ouch!

There and then, We made a decision to increase our price back to industry price and let clients who cannot afford it, go. It is a small price for growth. It worked.

As we began to grow, we noticed that we found it difficult to get outside the bracket fee we started with.

Building everything from the starch: We built many personal applications that could be the next big thing within a year, uncompleted. When we built a web app, as it happens with most developers, we believed that all it took was coding, a little testing on our systems, a friends’ systems and android phones, sending cold mails and bulk SMS, Facebook AD, and BAM! we blow. Wrong!

I would do things differently now; I would pick one app i could bank on as a personal project, search if there are reliable API out there that could save needless time reinventing the wheels, pay attention to what made it unique and what made it a superior product from what is already out there, painfully focus on the user experience, test, test, test, test, test, test, test…,get expert hands on marketing and promotion.

When we are building a web app, as it happens with most developers, we believe that all it took was coding, a little testing on our systems, friends’ systems and android phones, sending cold mails and bulk SMS, Facebook AD, and BAM! we blow. Wrong!

Starting a project without a contract (or at least a document of understanding): Nothing changes requirements faster than an unrestricted client. We did jobs that could have been done in weeks in months because the clients kept changing the requirements, he kept having ‘nice’ ideas about what he wanted.

A contract or document of understanding keeps that from happening because we (the client and developer) can refer to the document as guild line. It is true that as we move into the project do we see what we want more clearly and make adjustments, but at least compensation would be made if what we do is reasonably way more than it is required.

Nothing changes requirements faster than an unrestricted client.

As I think of more mistakes, i would add a sequence. Thanks for reading and feel free to tell me about your mistakes.