my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Recommendation: The Freelancer’s Show

If, like me, you're an independent consultant or freelancer I can highly recommend the podcast The Freelancer's Show, which is about the business of consulting and freelancing in the IT / software development industry. More than 300 episodes in it covers a wide range of subjects that are vital if you want to run a successful and sustainable software consulting business. Some of the questions the show tries to answer or at least help the listeners with are: How do I position myself? How ...

Survey for IT freelancers: How do you approach marketing and sales? – The results!

Ten days ago I published a survey for IT freelancers asking various questions about how they approach marketing and sales. As promised here are the results of the survey. Thanks a lot to everybody who participated: The survey was filled out by 31 freelancers, 22 of whom came via a link both posted on several forums and emailed to personal contacts directly. 8 participants clicked on the survey on Facebook while 1 filled it out on this website. Save for the last ...

Friday January 15th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Survey for IT freelancers: How do you approach marketing and sales?

As you probably know, I'm an independent IT consultant. Recently, I've been researching how to do marketing and sales in the industry in a bit more detail. I tried different approaches and made some experience with what works - and especially with what doesn't ... I'd like to share this experience with other IT consultants (e.g. through tutorials, best practices and tools for supporting sales processes). In order to get a better picture of how others in the industry approach marketing and ...

Tuesday January 5th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Everything you ever want to know about enterprise sales

This title sounds a bit like dirty secrets, doesn't it? When thinking of enterprise software sales most people think about arcane, lengthy, sometimes sleazy bureaucratic processes entailing: Vendors who are very secretive about pricing: If you have to ask for a price our product isn't for you! Lots of pointless meetings Obnoxious PowerPoint presentations A plethora of stakeholders A decision maker who won't be using the software product being bought and - of course - a user who doesn't have a say but has to use this ...

Sunday June 14th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship

Leaving your comfort zone

Leave your comfort zone is an oft-heard piece of advice on how to grow personally and generally get better at doing whatever is relevant to you. If you only ever stick to things you already know you deny yourself the opportunity to learn and experience something new. Why is leaving your comfort zone so hard then? Well, it should be. Doing something you're uncomfortable with initially means that the likely outcome is failure and failure is embarrassing. Sure, failure is an opportunity ...

Sunday February 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Björn Wilmsmann