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8 Apr 10 Location Independent 12 Week Challenge: Week 1
Location Independent Professionals is hosting a “12 Week Challenge” that I have signed up for.
The first weeks challenge poses a couple of questions that need to be answered, and here are my answers:
1) Decide exactly how you’re going to achieve location independence
Considering my background in software development, this one is easy: for-pay webapps and web based services that I will create.
I might initially have to “top it up” by doing some freelance software development, but hopefully I can start easing into doing it more and more on my terms rather than in a location dependent way.
2) Decide who your target audience/niche is
I already have credibility and a small following in the software development community through my other blog, and I am already running one web based service for developers, so I will expand on that (more on that on the next point).
To be more specific: my target audience will be individual, small and startup software development organizations and people. I already have 50 or so customers (and several hundred users) in this segment, it is people I enjoy serving, and something I think I can keep building on as I already have a small track record with them.
3) Decide what your initial offering will be
As alluded to in my previous point, I am already running one web based service for software developers, SVNsite, which is a Subversion and issue tracker hosting service. It is quite a commodity based service and highly competitive area, but bringing me in enough money on a monthly basis to probably pay rent in a lot of countries.
Not to divulge too much, but I have plans on starting to differentiate myself more in this and related areas - expanding on my existing service and building new, more differentiated services that will be all about helping software developers collaborate better, be more productive and leverage emerging cloud computing in a cost effective way.
The last paragraph might sound a bit like gobbledygook to the uninitiated, but that is partially on purpose to keep some of the things I’m working on a little under wraps. :)
