akassover

This works. Very well.

It works very well, if you can get the insurance agent to follow your instructions. In my experience (I co-founded agentmethods.com, which is roughly "Hubspot for insurance agents"), the best insurance agents often aren't the best writers and frankly don't want to do the work.

In a world where everyone wants the results but nobody wants to do the work, you quickly find snake oil sales people showing up selling the promise of no-work instant results. We've all come across those sleazy SEO firms promising first page rankings for a phrase nobody searches for. I'm not saying that Hubspot is that firm, but it is the world they play in.

For example, at Guidearama.com, our platform lets businesses turn marketing assets (videos, white papers, case studies, etc.) into a resource center on their website with lead generating landing pages. We've often ended up managing the entire program our clients are implementing around our platform. This can be packaged at a fixed cost and is much easier to price based on value than normal time & materials work. To our clients, we look like heroes because we can produce results very quickly using guidearama.com that in their minds should take 10x longer to complete.

There are a few benefits to this hybrid approach:

* The consulting work becomes decommoditized. You gain an unfair advantage because you developed the product the client is interfacing with.

* Your product builds your pipeline for you so you spend less time on sales and marketing.

* Your consulting work becomes more efficient because you can automate many tasks in your product that would otherwise take time if you were doing straight consulting work

In patio11's case, I don't think there wasn't an opportunity to do this because his consulting work and Bingo Card Creator didn't overlap - the case might be different with Appointment Reminder.

Funny example. We stayed at a place rented through airbnb last weekend in Tokyo that had a three ring binder containing only a 10 page guide on how to properly sorry the recycling. And even with that, I'm 100% sure we got it wrong.

I take full advantage of my flexibility. When the kids are off, I take the day off too. My wife's vacation days are limited & tracked, mine aren't, so I'm the first backup when daycare is closed. Not always the best for work, but I do really enjoy those days. Friday was a blast - I made breakfast for the kids, we hit the park, met my wife for lunch, I sped through some work while the kids napped, and then we had an encore park visit.

Looking back over your list of skills, you cover a lot of different technologies. I think it might be wise to pick something to be known for and run with it. Don't leave it up to your future customers to figure out what they can use you for because they will never figure it out.

I've never worked through elance, but I've hired a lot of people there. In my experience (again, as a hirer), once I find someone good, I stick with them. I've got freelancers that I met on elance years ago that I still work with. Don't know if this is normal, but if it is, I'd focus on building relationships and think of it as a marketing channel as opposed to your long-term revenue stream.

The closest thing I have is an xbox 360 in a closet. I've got a 4 year old macbook pro in a drawer that I keep as a cold spare, a 3 year old macbook air that gets used about 4 hours a month, and a 2 month old macbook pro that is my bread-and-butter machine.

However, I do know people with basements full of hardware.