riklomas

Part of the job of being freelance is expectation management - most clients want everything on a plate but you have to make them prioritize if they're on a budget... what is necessary and what is a nice to have.

I'm the writer of the article, I'll answer any questions you may have on here!

Always have a back-up plan so I'd clear out your debts first.

Yeh, of course! I'll give you a rough idea if you let me know your location in the email too :)

This was aimed at the idea validation stage. You shouldn't have built anything at this point as you're too busy talking to customers face-to-face, trying to hone the idea down.

CEO of a LLC is legal if you're in sole control of the company but yeh, owner/founder is fine too. I used to call myself Founder when the company was just me.

Fair play, my bad. I was a bit bemused that tschellenbach just dissed my startup's name in a dickish way without being critical. Apologises.

Yes I agree with this. I think if you're going to offer equity too, offer equity that vests over a longer period of time (3-4 years) might help keep them connected and give them a reason to stay with the business too. Make them work for ownership of the business.

We'll pivot into that if everything fails and my mother doesn't complain.

Haha, eastwards rather than westwards.

Yes, I'd agree with this. The agency comment was more aimed at the medium- to large-sized agencies rather than small, young ones (I kinda see them more as freelancers when it's an agency of 2-7).

Also it's a big variance of caring, some big agencies do care a lot but they're rare and hard to find. Some staff turn up late and are hungover every other morning. It's a wide range but I was trying to average it out!

A lot of brand names have vague or no references to what they do – Apple, Nike, Google, Heroku – we had a few other initial names that were like "Craft" and "Tailor" but didn't really work for us. We tried the more obvious ones and our customers didn't like them.

I'm still happy with the name two years later though and still love our branding. With the name we could use it in a few ways to make it more about learning... "learn the SuperHi way", "SuperHi school", etc.

We're also a bootstrapped company, so zero investment available for spending $$$ on a domain name. In the end, we went with what felt right for us and what our customers liked.