Winning Your First Project - A Developer's Guide to Starting Your Side Hustle

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-A-Nor podcast where we work on getting better step-by-step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're doing the developer journey. This episode, I'm getting right to the topic. Look at this, right away, we're going to talk about, but really it's winning your first project. We're going to talk about what do you need to do if you're going to do a side hustle, in particular, job is the same, but we're going to think of something where with the job, you have a resume, you get a job, you move on, you're doing all of that stuff with your job. If you're doing a side hustle, particularly project-based, then you're going to win a project, you're going to do it, but then that's going to feed the next project, the next project and the next project. Now, granted, it's a little bit focused on a consulting side, but it would also work if you are wanting to build products for people, so if you're more product-based. But before I get too far, I want to introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the Developer-Nor founders, also founder of RB Consulting where we do simplification, integration, and automation. That is like our bread and butter right there is finding ways to leverage technology to make your life evil, evil, easier and avoid the evil of technology sprawl. I can't even talk, so I'm going to have a little caffeine while Mike gets to introduce himself. Hey, everyone. I'm Michael Milaj, also one of the founders of Developer-Nor and founder of Invasion QA. So if you're looking for custom-built software or just having an assessment done of your current application stack to see if it's actually working for you, contact us. So let's talk about that first project. Winning your first project, one of the things you need to do is you need to establish, I guess there's two things to this. You want to establish who you are in order to win that first project, but then you also want that first project to help establish who you are. And now it's one of those things where you say, hey, I can do this. And then when we're done with that first project, which we'll cover this in the next episode, is taking that project and saying, hey, I did this, and so I can obviously do it again. Now, when you first come in, and this is probably going to feel familiar to when you first graduated college, you got out of your boot camp, is you're trying to get a job where people like experience, and then you look at it and you say, well, I don't actually have professional experience. We're going to have the same thing with our project. However, you have done stuff. You have written apps. You have written code. You have solved problems. And some of those things that happen on a regular basis. And so what you want to do is create a flyer, a website, a page, something, a LinkedIn profile that highlights that, that is something you can point to or send somebody to or hand to them, download them, put it on a signature of a file or something. It's like, hey, here is an example of some of my work. Now, if you don't have an example of some of your work, it's time to make an example of some of your work. One of the things that you're going to see, and this is something that I don't know how much we've talked about it on the within this season, but definitely some of last season and then some of the stuff you probably will see in the YouTube, particularly going back into the mentor mastermind sessions of days gone by. We'll talk about what is it that we what are the materials that we like to have, just like an artist, let's say, would have a portfolio. They'll have, let's say they do paintings. They'll have some paintings that they've done. What we want to do is we want to have some projects that we've done. If we don't have any that are good, then one of the things we can do is to help ourselves is create a little, do a little mini project that is that. We talk about this a lot in the book when we talk about that and the development of our book. We talk about using your learning as part of also building your resume. And so you're doing two things at once. You're building your skill set, you're building experience, but also you're doing so in a way that allows you to build out a portfolio and the tools that you have and to sort of show those tools off and say, hey, I can build an app in Java. I can do something in Python. I can do something in .NET or whatever it happens to be. So when you're starting out, the first thing you want to do is say, hey, do I have any projects? Do I have some things that would make sense? And you probably do, whether you did boot camp or you came out of a degree program or something. There was probably some sort of capstone project that you did. I know even if you never worked with Michael, he's got a Java thing and a tutorial boot camp thing he goes through. And that's one of the things you do is you build towards essentially a capstone project. And actually, usually there's a couple of those along the way. If you're using the Learn to Do Python series of stuff that we've got out in YouTube, there are little apps and essentially capstone kinds of projects within those. Now, what you want to do is don't just point people to your capstone project. Don't just be like, there it is. First, double check your work. Go back through and really refine, particularly if it's an application, go in there and make sure that it makes sense. Add comments. Do some things to add a little polish to it. Make sure that it's something that you are proud of. If there's something that you saw that's very complex, don't be afraid to call that out or maybe have a little highlight within documentation or something within the portfolio that says, hey, here's something I solved and here's how I solved it. What you want to do is present that you can understand problems, you can solve problems, and ideally, somehow within that is that you can do it in a reasonable amount of time. So it doesn't hurt to, one, look at sites that are out there that are consulting sites, and you will see examples of projects we've done, and they'll usually say, what was it done in? How long did it last? Maybe what was the cost and who was the customer? Those kinds of things are a perfect template for you to take your work and build it into that so that now what you're doing is you're going to be building out these little templates of, cool, look at the stuff I did, and be able to present that to customers. Within that, keep track of as much as you can, keep track of all of your proposals that you need to do, particularly from a consulting project-based thing, because whether you win or lose, the content that you generate is going to be useful for you to reuse, refine, and so if you maybe miss the first one, then when you come to the next one, you've made some adjustments. And if you've got any feedback that's come from either coworkers or customers or potential customers, definitely integrate that into your portfolio, we'll say, of documents and examples. Now, I'm given sort of like, I just sort of jumped up and lectured for a minute here, so I definitely want to step back and throw this out to Michael, and with one, what are some of your suggestions, but also maybe where some of these things have worked for you or where you've maybe had to make a couple of adjustments? Yeah, so in building, especially in kind of our history, working in health care and working like banking and things like that, some of the issues you run into as you're kind of building up your profile, is those NDAs or working on projects where you can't really talk about what it is you're working on. Now, in an essence, yes, the NDAs protect the company's intellectual property rights, but in the same sense, though, a lot of what you're doing in these projects are essentially kind of common knowledge. Now, if it's a very specific algorithm or something to a company, no, you don't want to take that and put that out on your portfolio or your profile, but a lot of the stuff that you do, like building web applications or building mobile applications, those are things you can put out on your profile, and you can be very explicit about it. It's like, hey, I can build a mobile application X, Y, and Z, and as you're putting together this kind of online portfolio, hopefully you're building it using like Git or some repository, and as Rob mentioned, as you go through the process of building these or putting these out there to be presented, you want to think about some of the things that it took you to get there. You know, what was involved in building this application? So you know you're going to have to spend time putting together, like doing the research, so you're going to have to spend time understanding the problem. You need to define what the project is, so once you kind of do the research, it's like, okay, now that we understand the problem, how did we go about putting together the design? So you go through that kind of design phase. You know, the whole SDLC process, but you can do that from a portfolio perspective by actually putting together your project or your view of your software in such a way that it follows kind of that SDLC process. You don't have to give away the kitchen sink if you're just setting something up to like sell a service or sell an application, but you do need to give enough information so that the person coming to your site starts reading and understands what it is that you provide. In the same token, and I just ran into this recently, and it just kind of was a refresher for me, was understand your target audience. So if the people coming to your site are non-technical, don't put a whole bunch of technical jargon up there. They're going to go away. They're going to go somewhere else because they're going to read the first paragraph and be like, what is this? This may be what I need, but I have no understanding of what it is that you're trying to communicate to me, so I'm going somewhere else. So you need to understand that whatever you put out there needs to be in a form conceptually that the consumer can ingest it. They can consume what it is in an understandable way. So if you're talking to doctors, make sure that you're using the right medical terms. If you're talking to businesses, make sure that you're talking in the correct business terms in that particular industry. Acronyms are good, but acronyms can mean different things from one industry to the next. So be very careful with making assumptions on things when you put out documentation. For example, RDBMS, Relational Day-Based Management System, a doctor has no idea what the hell that is. Write it out, then put the acronym. I actually put together an assessment recently and I gave up actually doing the acronyms. I wrote out the description everywhere in the document because even though I did the acronym, the first pass through when I had someone read it, they're like, what is that? Even though I had it in the definitions section and the terms and technology, it was still lost in the meaning. So be very clear and have people come back, have people proofread your documentation, whatever it is that you're putting out there. It does kind of show a bit of professionalism if you have that little bit of extra when it comes to presenting your materials. Thankfully, my daughter is an English major and she is a grammar Nazi when it comes to correcting me on things. So I thankfully can go to her or you can use like AI tools like Claude, ChatTPT or some of the other tools like Grammarly to check your context. So make sure whatever it is you put out is clean, understandable and congestible. Now, the next piece of that, as you're building that profile, as you're working either on your side hustle or in your day job, you're going to come across things where you're going to write those little utility scripts. We've talked about these in the past where it's like, oh, I do this repetitively. So I create a script. Make sure you capture that. Make sure you document that and then put it into your little bucket somewhere so that you can come back and reuse it later. This could be something even where you could put it out in GitHub and open up to the world and say, hey, I have this. What do you guys think? And then you get public feedback. You can tweak it. You can make it great. And then, hey, there's recognition. The other thing with that, to take that one step further is you could actually even go out to GitHub, search for similar ideas for things that you've worked on, find a project and become a contributor to that project to get your name out there, which helps build your brand, build your name recognition. And it helps you to be more accessible. And you can point to that on resumes and in interviews. Lastly, before I hand it back to you, Rob, is get involved in similar communities online, be it LinkedIn, online groups, Discord, whatever. Go find things that you're interested in, especially when it comes to your business or your side hustle, and start figuring out what people want. How are they using it? What other interesting things are out there? Reason I say that is because I was recently in a co-starter class and came across someone that had a problem. And all of a sudden, my rebranding business became a solution for someone in the class. So you never know until you just get out there and talk to people what it is that they want, what problems they need help with. And if you're a solution or if you have a solution that you don't even know you have till you talk to someone, it's like, oh, I have this. Here it is. Here. It'll cost you. But I already had something. So these are just some ideas and ways that you can take your side hustle or even an idea and turn it into a side hustle. And those are excellent because the focus I had as I started this is really about setting up your brand. It's like, what does your brand look like? And really, the next step is like a nice little follow up. It's almost like we scripted this even. So cool. Even though we didn't. Is in Michael saying, OK, now that you've got that, what do you do with it? Because there are a lot of businesses out there where people have and products, they're awesome. And somebody gets everything built. It's there. Crickets, because nobody knows it's there. And so you do need to find ways to get your name out there. Now, you can do stuff like try to do a billion dollar advertising blitz or something like that. But you probably don't want to do it if it's a little side hustle, which you can do, which will help you in so many ways is get involved in your user communities, whether it's maybe it's the local business bureau or chamber of commerce, or maybe it's some sort of like a meetup group or one of the LinkedIn groups or something like that. One of these, you know, a chat board, whatever it happens to be so that you are becoming a member and you're active, you're integrating or you're you're communicating with other people. You're part of it and you are, you know, getting information as well as sharing information. As Michael said, what you'll do is you'll end up in conversations, whether it's virtual or not. And there will be ideas that will come to you. People will say, hey, this is a problem I've got. And you may say, I already have solved that problem. Or you may say, that's a really interesting problem. Why don't we sit down and talk about it? It's something like that. And a lot of times that's what we find. And honestly, that's where a lot of my best customers have come from, is that we start with something and we start talking about that problem a little bit more. And the next thing you know, they're like, oh, there's this problem over here I never really talk about. I love to see it solved, but I just don't think it's solvable. Next thing you know, we have a project that's solving that because it's you look at it and you say, oh, you know what? That is possible. There is a way we could do that. And you walk them through it. So it's. It's really that twofer, that two step of setting up your brand and then being your brand is going out there and talking about it and finding a way to effectively shout from the mountaintops instead of just put your shingle out and say, hey, my business is open, is find ways to get out there and let people know that your business is open. And you can do that right away. You can do that today. You could go look at a couple of just look for groups and whatever your favorite social site is or topics or areas and start just being a part of it. Be a member of that. Join in and contribute some. Some of these places, they're gamified. It'll have like a little tag that says, you know, brand new member, highly, you know, highly contributing member, gold star member, whatever it is. And you want to work your way up to that. And it may just be simple sites like, you know, Reddit or somewhere like that. There may be one of these sites that you use that it's a that people go to with experts. And that's fine. But just be sure that as you're doing that, that you are you're aware that that's that's your brand. You're out there and get out there, get involved, find some of these sites and start being active. And that's where you're going to start seeing your first business, your first project come to. For a wrap up, I want to throw it back to you, Michael, if there's anything else that I triggered or any any follow ups you want to throw out there. Yeah, I actually triggered a thought of, you know, yes, we deal with a lot of online tools and you can do a lot of things in chat groups and things like that that we mentioned here. Other things is look within your community. You don't necessarily have to go look around the world to solve a problem. Also, if you're having problems understanding your customers, go to things in your area like local meetups or possibly business conferences and just walk around the vendor vendors area and watch how people interact with other vendors or other customers. If you're not good at sales and you're not good at marketing, you may not know what to ask or what questions to trigger or even how necessarily to listen to some cues from your customer or potential customer as to what their problem is or what they're really asking for. Because sometimes they'll say one thing, but they really mean something else. And it takes time to kind of flush through that. So if you actually go look for those venues or events and there are some online, but just go walk around like the vendor shows and see what potential people are doing. Even a car shows great because then you hear people say, OK, well, I'm looking for a car. Well, what kind of things do you want in a car? Do you need four tires? Do you need an engine? You know, what do you need? So you hear these salespeople ask all these questions. You're going to have to start thinking that way. But these are just some of the starting points to get there. I agree. There's there's definitely a value being a, you know, essentially a fly on a wall in some of these conversations, conferences. That is a great thing that you can get from this. Talk to the vendors, listen to the conversations that go on and you will you will start to pick up on some of the language, some of the approach. How do you how do you ask questions? How do you keep asking questions to draw out your customer? And one of the things you could do is you could do things like request feedback like we're asking for right now is send us an email at info at developer.com or leave us a comment or send us smoke signals, however you want to get to us. There is really a lot of different ways you can get to us, whether it's through the form contact us form on development or dot com, whether it's content or comments on out on our podcast site, out on YouTube, out on all the different places that you see that you can receive and check out podcasts. You can also, as I said, shoot us email lots of different ways. We're happy to hear from you and figure out from you help us figure out what is like some of the best topics to come forward and to add into this. Where do you want to become a better developer and how can we help you do so? Let us know and we probably have some suggestions and maybe some topics that we're going to cover based on that specific. We are not done though. We are just getting started in this season and we'll be back next episode. We're going to just continue talking through this developer journey and sort of get into what is it that helps you grow from wherever you're at to becoming a better developer and note that really wherever you're at to be anywhere and that better developer is never going to end. It's never you never hit best developer. You just always are going to get better. So step here, step there. We don't journey of a thousand steps starts with that first step. Go out there and take that first step into your day. Have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.