How to work in Sharepoint 2010 Team based development?

Help software developers work on their own!

• I've been working with a group of 2 other senior engineers for several years. We each have about ten years experience doing web development, mainly doing high volume e-commerce sites. Our work is client services based, companies come to our company to build sites out. We'd like to do this for ourselves. Our question is very basic, what our options for bidding work or getting clients? Do recruiters ever have projects they give out to bid? Bonus: the other two engineers are female, so we'd qualify for any contracts that give weight to women owned businesses. We're very good at what we do, work well as a team and have investors in place. Several of us have experience with startups, but no one wants to get into straight product development. We want to do client service work, ideally we'd like to land a project, and then six month later do another project. We've hit the pavement and are networking like crazy, we're locally recognized as good developers. We're invited to conferences and give talks at local meetups, and while we have a few prospects through this, these relationships seem to take a long time to build. So we have a few questions we're came up with and are throwing out there: - Perhaps I'm remembering the halcyon dot-com days, but do tech recruiters ever bid out projects? If so, how do we find these types of recruiters? - Most, if not all, of the software development bid sites seem packed with low-quality projects and people underbidding each other. We're not interested in this sort of work. I would like to emphasize we aren't kids out of college looking to be the next Facebook. The analogy we like using is that we're a bunch of lawyers at a large law firm and want to open up our own practice. Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we're not allowed to take our clients with us. Any other thoughts would be great. Our goal, again, is simply to work for ourselves. We're not married to the idea of doing straight development and would definitely do consulting and training, but we have no clue how to go about that. If you'd like to keep the conversation private, here's a throwaway address we're using: [email protected]

• Answer:

  Make friends. There are lots of people - like me - who do product strategy work and partner with developers to build out web and mobile apps. I think it's unlikely that you'll find this work via recruiters - meetups and conferences, as you suggest, are more effective. Sometimes this does take some long lead time.