We are the BrainLeaf team, and we can help prevent years of frustration, lost profit, and stress for web and app developers and designers as they grow their businesses.
What’s this blog about?
This space is a community for marketing, web, and app studios, agencies and freelancers who want to grow their web businesses. We want to share the business knowledge we’ve picked up along the last 12 years, the tools of the trade, strategies and other things about running a development and marketing company that most people just have to learn as they go.
After many bumps and bruises, we know how stressful, time-consuming and unforgiving the freelance/startup world can be. So topics on the blog will cover the basics so you can read, learn, and move your projects more quickly and profitably. But we’ll also have a more in depth series on all kinds of business issues you may encounter.
What are some of the things we will be writing about?
- How to run a web business
- How to market services and products
- How to deal with bad clients
- Working with employee issues
- Understanding contracts
- Scope and pricing systems
- How to structure income
- How to make more money
- Common mistakes new developers and agency owners make
This is going to be an educational blog. And its direction will be as much informed by our own experiences as it will be by your input. As you encounter new challenges in your business, tell us, and we’ll address them here. Or share your thoughts (good, bad, random) on our approaches in the comments.
Failure is a good thing…sort of
Failure is good thing. You grow and learn through failure. In the decade we’ve been in the business, if there was a way to screw something up, we’ve probably done it. We want to share our knowledge with you so you don’t have to rely so much on your own “learning experiences.” You can avoid the tears, sweat, lawsuits, heart problems, lost hair, tears, etc. and get to where we are (successful, profitable, excited) a lot quicker.
Also, what is BrainLeaf?
You’re probably here in the first place because you heard about a product we sell called BrainLeaf. We’ve been cooking up BrainLeaf for almost a year, and it’s based on an internal system we’d been using for more than ten years. That old internal tool we used was pretty ugly, but it got the job done. We spent the last year transforming that old tool into a more useful, cleaner and more powerful experience for developers, sales people, and project managers.
BrainLeaf makes project scoping quick and easy to put together. It’s a great tool for the freelancer just getting started, who doesn’t have a scoping system in place, or the experienced developer looking to increase productivity. With BrainLeaf, users can price out each aspect of a project, like the hosting, the CMS system, integration, and everything in between, with one app that can be easily shared with a potential client. And this is just the beginning. We have many exciting features coming down the pipeline for BrainLeaf. If you follow the blog, you’ll get the latest on our business strategy, development projects, people and companies we admire, and of course jokes and pictures of cats.
