Moving closer to the sale

The definition of moving up the value chain will be different for freelancers depending on their industry. But in general, the closer you are to the sale, the higher you will be valued, and the more you can charge.
For example, a content writer is just responsible for writing a certain number of blog posts per week.
But a content strategist is responsible for the overall strategy of a website to bring in new leads and customers
.”
Joe Choi
on GrowthLab.

The quote above is clearly targeted at an audience that has seemingly little overlap with the OSS industry. However, the concept holds true for our industry as well. The closer you are to consistently making an OSS sale or initiating an OSS project, the higher you tend to be valued and harder it is to replace you.

Despite its somewhat tarnished reputation, the OSS industry still attracts enormous amounts of capital globally. However, the sales cycle tends to be lengthy on the allocation of that capital, with many flaming hoops to jump through before starting a project. Part of the reason for lengthy sale processes is because there are so many objections to overcome from so many stakeholders. There are objections from the financiers, the technical experts, the implementers, the operators, the executives and more. It follows that the list of objections will be multi-faceted in nature. The rainmakers are so invaluable in our industry because they find a way to navigate the array of objections, often with the help of very talented teams.

As mentioned last week in “Software is eating the world…. and eating your job?” software is revolutionising the OSS industry. At first glance, you would think a software developer is in prime position to benefit from this change, but the post suggested otherwise (in some cases).

Moving closer to the sale and / or being consistently responsible for getting OSS projects off the ground is the better guarantee of an assured income stream. And to get there requires being a tripod or the red sector in the following diagram (sourced from this old post):
Network_Software_Business_Venn

As an industry, we have to get better at building our skills in the red and yellow intersects so that we keep building a pipeline of projects that add enough value to justify the capital they attract.

As an aside, whilst smart contracts have the potential to coordinate algorithmic purchasing, being closer to the sale will probably also make it harder to replace our roles with bots in the years to come.

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