ensemblehq

As someone whose transition to being more of a consultant, entrepreneurship is such a broad term that gets misinterpreted. There is no real job title called entrepreneur. What it sounds like you're really describing is that you want to capitalize on your skillset in order to generate additional income in which case it would be useful to think about what sort of activities do you actually want to do with your time? What fulfills you the most?

Here are some ideas that generate income but are quite different in terms of activities: - fractional CTO advisory services - engineering team coach - teaching at a local collage - writing a book

Wow. I’m very impressed by the site and even more so by how you did it over a winter break. It’s definitely very intuitive and I’ve been looking for a way to learn music theory as an adult. Thank you!

I’ve been consulting for 4 years with considerable success so you could say it’s kinda “freelancing long term”. Whilst I originally was stressed about the need to constantly seek new projects/clients, it’s stabilized a little bit and I have built up some savings to at least give me a buffer. For managing internal stress, I’ve turned to Buddhism to help keep me going through tough times but also realized that reputation and client base has played a key role in me keeping this up long term.

My client base is a mix of startups and enterprises. Enterprises have given me longer term projects and have deeper pockets which reduces income unpredictability. The good work that me and my team does also provides us with good referrals and case studies that we can talk about with future customers.

As a solo consultant at the beginning of the journey, I adopted the mindset of being a 1 person business and acted like a business which meant doing sales/marketing activities (i.e. built partnerships, strategize to focus on value propositions, act like an advisor) to keep things going.

Happy to answer more questions!

Hey Ahmed, looks like your portfolio website is down?

Enterprise software is a different beast as the buying cycle and structure is a lot different. Selling into the enterprise requires a different go-to-market strategy. It's why you never see things like 'Superhuman' reach mainstream tech.

Hey Alex!

Indeed - good point to ensure business continuity. There should also be a transition period to ensure OP, you’re getting support (like 6 months of service) in addition to code that allows you to address the issue if the vendor does disappear.

Whilst I don’t have a ton of experience in logistics, I have helped executives in other industries map out transition strategies.

For the software in question, a few considerations come to mind:

- how critical is the software to your company’s competitive advantage?

- how big is the vendor team supporting the software?

- how much revenue/customers does the vendor currently support?

- how much of the software is entirely custom developed vs modules built on top of other platforms?

- where does the software reside (on-prem/in-house acct vs mix vs vendor)?

Without knowing too much detail about the situation, if it’s an application that is easily testable and verifiable (I.e. perform an action results in observable actions), then it’s much easier to rewrite than an application with background functions and procedures so some level of due diligence or discussion with the vendor maybe useful.

Other alternative solutions that may make sense if software is critical:

- joint venture with vendor

- code acquisition + in-house team

- code/team acquisition

- short feasibility project to determine migration strategy

I’ve worked fairly extensively in transition/acquisition projects so happy to share more if there’s anything specific you’re interested in knowing.

Indeed there will be some premium to pay but it depends. I've done work under some consulting firms before but specifically for Canada, I know of Procom that does exactly what you're describing with less cut than the consulting firms. Pretty sure there would be a similar entity in the US since it's fairly common business practice.

If I understand correctly, you're looking to consult with a large company since your corporation has limited history, you need a corporation with a more extensive history to subcontract to yourself in order to do the work?

Have you had a look at fractional firms? I have a hunch that they'd be willing to do it.

Incredible. Yes perfect. Thanks Ned!

Hi Ulysse, this is incredibly timely as we are looking at a more cost-effective alternative to WorkOS as we're building our enterprise data validation portal. Will give it a go and see how we make out - do you have any immediate instructions on integrating with Entra ID? Is it literally just the API endpoint that's needed?

More people to do more building which increases team size and inflates ego? :)

I don't understand the whole SPA movement either and it feels like it just doubles the amount of work needed to maintain anything. I reach for Django/server-side when I can but unfortunately, not many folks appreciate those thoughts.

I can see some perfectly valid use cases but there are times when it's just not needed.

So far it depends on the use case. GPT4o has been super useful with code generation tasks for POC but we've used Claude 3 to try and make educated predictions.

Appreciate the post. Was in a similar situation myself - always wanted to be an "entrepreneur" but ultimately, needing to survive to feed the family is what kickstarted it all. I really appreciated how, even though you didn't have a technical background, you found a path that works for you and even more so, focusing on what you CAN do vs what you CAN'T do. And sometimes, you do get hosed on a deal at the start before you establish trust and credibility and then eventually learning your way around the trade.

As a consultant, it's been extremely useful for rapid prototyping for POC projects.

100%. You also buy Salesforce because your salespeople demand you too. It's something users are familiar with and excel in. Dislodging an incumbent is a lot more than just the technical product itself.

Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....

I can recommend Ultranauts. They have a fully neuro-divergent culture. Personally have a connection with the founder and happy to be the bridge.

Like most cases, the answer is always “it depends”. Without knowing too much about the application and the state of the startup (do you have users? do you have funding-related milestones or are you bootstrapping?), it’s tricky to recommend a production stack off the bat.

Most basic versions of production web apps could be backends coupled with an ORM like Ruby on Rails/Django/Spring/etc. No need to complicate things by splitting the front-end since you’re the only developer and your experience is ERP. Pick a tech that you’re strong with and reuse popular battle-proof libraries. Deploy to application platforms and offload the infrastructure management if your startup can afford it.

You can also leverage fractional CTO services to help guide you through the process. Personally, I’ve mentored a few junior developers on an ad-hoc, hourly basis to help them build out their expertise.

Had similar experiences. This is why they need to bring the proper folks to think through the problem - digital is great until it doesn't work and paper is just less of a pain for everyone. Also, costs a lot less!

Would be great if the Nango team can address it but my experience as that "300 dollars per hour" consultant (although I never got to see anywhere close to that) is that most ERP systems are heavily customized that it would be hard to auto-generate endpoints/documentation off of it.

Have you had a chance to go through your customers' ERP systems?

I wholeheartedly agree that technical advice isn’t needed at this stage and likely the main thing to solve for is how fast can you iterate to an MVP and PMF-solution that could allow you to fundraise further. I’ve worked with some startups where they outsourced on a solution basis to alleviate the risk of building the wrong thing. Architecture was ok but not the most important issue at the current stage.

Disclaimer: I run a consulting firm with fractional CTO services for startups and previously founded a startup.

Hi dataherald team. Firstly, congratulations on the launch. I’ve been in the data space for a while and know all the effort it must be to get this up and running.

As a consultant, I’m considering this as part of an offering to a client. Was hoping to chat more about the security/privacy and operational model of the hosted vs open-source offerings. Who should I reach out to?

Most frameworks if architected properly on the backend are scalable.

You might want to check out the Quasar framework (Vue.js) as an alternative to React. It's a single framework that lets you build web applications and mobile applications with a single codebase. This is frontend only but will complement with Django REST API/Flask/FastAPI.

Personally, found it a lot faster and easier working with Vue.js/Quasar but documentation can also be tricky. Chat GPT has helped in this instance.

Consulted in the space about 3 years ago. Regulatory powers lack tooth. Most large banks are not ready (i.e. poor security, complex backend, no scalability, etc.) and are scrambling to find solutions while begging for my time. Also, lots of discussion and jostling and fear of what might happen when it goes live. No one can truly agree on the legal framework as well so feels like much work to be done.

Was also part of the implementation phase in the UK and the regulatory powers there definitely sped things up.

Neither. Although less hyped, at the enterprise level, there are still plenty of Hadoop/Spark implementations. Organizations are just trying to decide on whether to move these implementations to the cloud, retain some form of on-prem to retain control, or migrate to other platforms like Snowflake.

Primarily used LucidChart but it’s ok. Plantuml has been ok as well.

Not sure if DataSheetGrid is purely a UI component as the demo seems to indicate otherwise but tankstacktables just provide table functionalities without a UI. You select the framework you need (i.e. React, Vue, etc.) and the UI framework to overlay on top of it (i.e. react-bootstrap, etc.)

I've been involved with several enterprise applications based off of Django - leveraging signals, custom models, tasks, etc. to power insurtech and fintech applications.

Be humble. Have a willingness to learn new perspectives and accept you don't know everything.

That's fantastic. From your contract on LinkedIn, you can branch out. The hardest step is usually the first step but if you have built a really strong reputation, people will come to you for projects without you having to chase them. That's why I opt for networking - it's an opportunity to persuade rather.