Often in the early stages of selling a prospect they will want you to do a lot of the design and architecting of a solution for free. It is a delicate subject to bring up, but you can’t do work for free. The sooner you bring that up and agree that you should be paid for your work – but not proposal writing, sales and marketing – the better off you’ll be. The most effective method is to make them want your expertise.

When you are in the fortunate position to have arrived at the contract negotiation stage it’s often useful to remember that the different parties value different aspects of the contract unequally. In other words, one party might value getting a good price very highly while the other party values keeping control of intellectual property. Here are some common points of negotiation.

Founding, growing and running a company brings a fairly diverse set of challenges and experiences. It has been very humbling to realize the value of experience (without ignoring raw talent). Going forward I hope to share some insights as they occur and apply and explain how I handle them through the lens of my experience. My hope is that reader can learn from my mistakes and successes and boost their trajectory.