Web Worker Daily

Life as an entrepreneurial web worker can be great - or it can be an absolute nightmare of overwork, missed deadlines, unsatisfied customers, and (in the worst case) lawsuits. Just having an idea or knowing how to write code isn’t enough for a successful online career. Here’s our selection of five ways to take that career nowhere in a hurry - and what to do about them.

Forget that you’re in business. We hope you love working online as much as we do - but don’t forget that love alone doesn’t buy a jar of peanut butter, let alone pay the rent. If you’re a web worker (as opposed to a web dilettante), you need to treat your work as an actual business, with a business structure, a separate bank account, contracts, invoicing, tax withholding, and all the rest. Forgetting this can have severe consequences, from headaches and expense later when you try to sort things out right up to time in the slammer if the IRS takes the wrong view of your sloppiness. If you don’t have insurance or formal contracts, many potential clients will pass on the chance to hire you, no matter how brilliant you may be. If you forget to send out invoices, don’t be surprised if you never get paid.

Try to do everything yourself. Although you do need to be businesslike, this doesn’t mean you need to write your own contracts, set up your own tax withholding, and so on. You have a core business on the web, and you need to focus on that. Painful though it is for most new web workers to spend money, it’s important to hire what Pamela Slim calls the “Big Four“: lawyer, accountant, banker, and insurance agent. These people will save you money in the long run, both by doing their own jobs much more efficiently than you could and by protecting you from making boneheaded amateur mistakes. You may not think you have the money to hire professional help, but I guarantee you don’t have the time to get these parts of your business right by yourself and still do your own work. And getting these parts of your business wrong can lead to a complete disaster very quickly.

Mistake a feature for a product. People are starting to talk about Bubble 2.0 lately. Part of that is because there are a lot of people building Web 2.0 applications who have at most half an idea: “Hey, we could do X with Y online, isn’t that neat?” Unless you have some story that ties this back to a customer need, you haven’t got a product, no matter how many rounded corners you put on the thing. If you’re building the Next Big Startup (instead of doing contract work), you need to be serious and realistic about whether you have any potential for making money. It doesn’t hurt to keep your contract work skills up to date, too.

Forget whose time you’re working on. Web workers tend to be multi-taskers. Sometimes we hop back and forth between our own projects and our customers; sometimes we launch a startup before leaving our day jobs. It is absolutely critical that you only bill customers for time spent on their projects, and that time billed to customers is 100% devoted to those customers. Break this rule, and you may find yourself in a situation like that of the founder of PromoterForce: sued by a former employer for being careless enough to work on his new startup while on his old company’s clock.

Sell technology instead of results. If you’re a software developer, the odds are better than even that you’re passionately invested in the tools and language that you use, whether they center around Ruby on Rails or J2EE or .NET or Smalltalk or anything else. Tough though it can be to learn this lesson, learn it early: your customers don’t care. If another consultant can do a better job using a different tool, all those technical factors you love won’t matter one bit. You need to identify the pain points for your customer - speed of delivery, reliability, security, scalability, whatever they may be - and constantly focus on selling solutions to those pain points. Successful web workers speak the customer’s language, not their own.

Got your own nominations for the biggest mistakes that web workers make? Let us know in the comments!