IT's on!
Getting started
It's a bit more than two months that I left my old job and that I started my own business! Up to now the work has been intensive, but behind the scene:
- Founding the company: Thanks to one of those startup-creation websites this has been pretty fast and painless.
- Getting a bank account: Funnily, getting my bank account took longer than the subscription to the "registre du commerce".
- Getting insurances: One thing one should not neglect when thinking about starting a company: Before you are able to work and earn some money, you actually have to get a bunch of compulsory and highly recommended insurances, and pay plenty of bills!
- Adopting some ERP software: That was a hard one... but better now than never!
- Business plan: Even if you don't write a full business plan you have to think how you are going to position your company and what you are going to offer and to whom.
- Fortunately, I already had some jobs to do that kept me busy as well.
So, the publishing our website is the first act targeted to a larger public and thus very special! We are aware that this website is our "poster child" and we hope that it is up to our standards! Obviously, being generalists we cannot present all the work we expect to do, but give some insights and delimit the scope of our activities. We hope you find the site navigation clear and that the content is consistent, while on the design side, we did something that was appealing to our eyes and stayed close to bootstrap (we are no web designers after all).
About tweax
For the ones who still wonder what we are actually doing: We see ourselves as generalists for IT, passionate about our work and with a vast set of tools and eager to learn new ones. Obviously, we cannot pretend to do a better job than your team of engineers and developers! But we believe that there is a vast space of IT issues where our clients do not have interest in, or lack the competency in-house, and where our offer may be a good match. Our resources are limited, and therefore we cannot develop everything from scratch, but rely on work others have done and generously provide and publish on the internet. From our side, we will have to respect the specific licenses and give credit where credit is due, and hopefully we will be able to give back some valuable work to the respective communities!
Multi-lingual and dynamic
We decided to develop and host our website ourselves. This is not only completely in line with our principles at tweax, where we like to do new and exciting things, and building a commercial website is something we haven't done before. But it also has the nice side effect of helping to stop the hemorrhage of cash, when you start a business without many clients and plenty of free time!
One of our goals is to have a multi-lingual website with dynamic content that can easily be adapted and changed. Since we have the chance to speak multiple languages, why not making it our advantage? On the other hand, we like to see "under the hood" and we stand by our commitment to Python, even if django might look a bit outdated nowadays. First, we considered to make our website with the help of the ERP software we started using internally. But it's actually the first free and open source software I am using, where I am aware of its origin from my homeland by alliance: India! But despite liking to work with it and being very powerful, I did not have any confidence in its support for internationalization. We had been experimenting with wagtail and django-cms a couple of years ago, and our choice very rapidly went for wagtail, with the nice surprise that they have integrated internationalization support in between.
Concerning the translation of our content, we will try to have most content available in the French and English languages, while for German, we will restrict ourselves to the more important things. One exception is our blog, where we'll leave the translations to our mood and expected audience.
What's to come
Now that our website is up and running, we will go back to the core of our business and think about products and services we would like to offer. We currently have two hardware products -- a phone central and a firewall -- that are in the field and where we would like to improve the technical and commercial descriptions. We are also thinking about infrastructure monitoring and SLAs, because it would allow us to have some constant cash flowing in, but on the other hand it is heavy to set up, as every use case will be different. Moreover, being a one-person operation for the moment, we will not be able to ensure 24/7 availability, making idea the tough to defend.
We also will try to get a bit a broader audience (other than the people that know me personally, or the ones that wonder what I become, after I suddenly left the QCLs). For this, the plan is to do some fun (and probably useless) projects and are hoping to promote them in the various social networks, with the help of pictures of fluffy cats!
Thanks
Since this is our first post, it is also the ideal place to thank all the people that are behind us and support us and our endeavour. First of all, obviously, my wonderful wife Belinda who believes in me and my capacities and supports me wherever she can. Without her support, I never would have started this adventure! Then obviously families and friends that have been supportive to our idea over the years, and some of which are actually our first clients!