I’ve always had ideas bouncing around in my head. Aside from a blog and personal site, I wanted to create a website that offered a service. I was a junior in college and knew I had to make something that would create a constant cash flow, just in case work got slow. I spoke to my friend Steve, who at the time was better than me at both design and programming (he still is at design, but I think I win with programming). I proposed this idea: a website called College Housing.

The premise was this: Landlords would pay to list student housing they had available, with description, photos, contact info, etc. It would be a nice directory, and a nice way to make money. But the honest thing is we had no clue what we were doing. Sure we had an idea for a website, but we didn’t have:

• Any data to back-up the idea would work
• Marketing skills
• Capital for advertising
• Experience building a system like this
• Time to do it
• A plan for the long term
• A way to get users

That is quite a list. We started some of the planning, and even some of the coding, thinking we could just piece it together. The truth is we didn’t have any professional experience or background knowledge in doing something like this, or any professionals to run the idea by. It was destined to fail. But on of my CS professors once said this:

We will learn from our success and from our failure.

It wasn’t the fact that we failed. It was the fact that we tried. And now we know what we need to do at different stages of creating a project like this. Since you’re reading this blog, you know that 1/2 of freelancing (or anything, I suppose) is learning. And in my opinion the best way to learn is by doing. The advice I can pass on to you is [on top of this list of things up top] don’t just jump into some project you hope to profit off of. Make sure you know what you’re doing, who you’re doing it for, and have a 6, 12, and 24 month plan. Especially in software development, planning is most of the battle.

Tags: beginning, failure, side projects, tips | Posted in Stories |