Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How to continue with a company that is interested in my project know how and want me to work on a fixed contract

• posted by: tareq on 2016-05-16
• tagged: saas, contracts, freelancing
• score: 2

On my part-time business, I worked on a project over the last year every once in a while to setup and configure a prototype. This was more of accumulating knowledge, not for a customer and without any revenues so far. Now I have a prospect company (system provider) working in my target business sector I want to work in and they are interested in my know how from that project. Additionally, I currently think about changing company for my permanent job. The prospect company would also be perfect for me to work with them on a fixed contract (what they offered to me) which would also have positive aspects for me like

• getting more responsibility for the entire inhouse project, not only supplying legwork
• getting more into my target sector in terms of contacts and better customer understanding
• don’t care so much about social insurance costs as when working 100% freelance

While working with them, I still want to retain my own company and do some work on my other occasional projects, lets say a few hours per week.

I am aware that this strategy might cause troubles, because I want to work with similar customers with the prospect company as well as on my own company.

I thought about the following possibilities to handle this issue

• work part time for them and keep the rest for own projects. Issue here is still a similar customer base (except I won’t handle big customers on my own company)
• working inhouse as a usual employee but on a freelance contract, ensuring this will cover my costs
• developing the project on my company’s responsibility, getting paid by supplying their special use case

I am not really sure how to handle this. Key is to me, to get into the target sector in the medium term and to retain the options I have with my own company but avoiding the unsteadiness of an early startup.

Would be interested, if there’s anyone who experienced a similar situation and how you handled it.

Answer 9271

• posted by: mrv on 2016-05-20
• score: 1

careful a lot of employment contracts have some sort of a restraint on competition and/or trade in them.

you could also do a collaboration, where your company continues development and licenses the result to the other company, so they can sell it to their customers.

---

All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.