Owning a business is by far the most effective way to improve your financial wealth, as well as expand your potential and share your skills by creating a product that is needed in a certain sphere. Owning an IT company has even more advantages, including remote work (both yours and employees) and relevance in the modern world. This article is about the first steps you need to take for a successful start.

The first thing we start with is clients. Even if you hired the coolest developers in the world, bought the most powerful computers and rented an office in the city centre, your business may not last even a few months, because the problem with the workload of developers with projects has not been resolved.

The “golden rule” of starting any business or startup: before you start anything, you must have at least 3 people who agree to buy your service even before you create them (and one person, according to statistics, will definitely do).

• To find potential customers there are several options:
• Freelance exchanges: UpWork, Freelancer, etc.;
• Word of mouth (friends, acquaintances, former clients of the company you worked for);
• Social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) If you want to find clients for software development services from the United States or Europe, then the best option is LinkedIn.
• Hiring a consulting agency to help you build a sales & marketing strategy for your IT company.

Company staff. Everything is relatively simple here – at the initial stage, you can independently act as the “staff” of your company (most IT companies started their activities this way), or immediately hire one or several employees.

There is also an option to found an IT company without a single developer: for this, you can use the previously mentioned freelance exchanges like UpWork and Freelancer to hire performers. But in this case, there are big risks of hiring an unprofessional developer and losing both the client and the money, because the exchange guarantees the return of money to the client if the work is not done or done poorly.

That’s why when the flow of your clients starts to grow, you would better create or hire a remote team for your project. After all, one of the main keys to success is a well-coordinated, professional and reliable team.

Technology stack or choice of technologies for a company. If you are building a company from scratch, pay attention to the popularity of technology in the IT world (JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, C++, etc.). By choosing one of the top technologies, you guarantee yourself a demand for it for at least the next 5 years.

It is also worth mentioning the development strategy of the IT company. Even after finding the first clients and proving a name in the IT world, you may face some problems.

Choosing a niche for bringing your IT company to Western markets is an example of one of those problems. When you start your business or plan further development in Western markets, it is very important to take into account a number of factors:

• GDP of the country – the more, the better;
• popularity of your particular technology in a given country;
• experience of working with customers from this region;
• the weight of the chosen industry in the business of the country.

• Business development strategy. Even if you have chosen the right market and technology, there is a lot of work ahead on tactical issues that need to be planned:
• to create an Ideal Customer Portrait;
• to create a Unique Sales Proposal;
• to create presentations and case studies describing your experience and projects;
• to set up and automate the process of lead generation in the company using automators for LinkedIn;
• to organise the process of lead generation for UpWork on your own or by hiring a lead generator;
• to write articles to enter Western markets with the help of SEO.

To summarise the above, the most important step is to start. You need to carefully take the right steps, not be afraid to leave your comfort zone and boldly defend your positions.We hope that the article helped you a little to outline the first steps that you need to take to create, or understand the main directions for scaling an IT company.