How I went from a SharePoint project to running a Freelancer marketplace

Back in 2006, I walked into the offices of a London-based consultancy in central London to begin my first project with SharePoint.

I am not going to lie, I was very nervous. I'd previously spent over 10 years crafting my trade as a Microsoft developer, but didn't feel confident, or know what to expect with “SharePoint”.

I'd done as much preparation as the (lack of) documentation on SharePoint 2007 would allow me, but I still felt uncomfortable being tasked with developing on top of a massive platform for the first time.

This was a familiar story for many working in consultancies at the time (and probably still is). SharePoint was beginning to really take-off, and sales folk from all around the country were selling it to solve all manner of problems and usually to very tight deadlines.

Our team was set the goal of building a SharePoint 2007 Intranet for a large financial company.

My main role was to develop new features for their Intranet, and I distinctly remember how utterly stressful it turned out to be.

Firstly, I was working 200 miles away from Helen and the kids, trying to solve endless problems to some pretty eye-watering deadlines.

To add to the pressure, we had weekly Sprint presentations to the stakeholders where we'd be expected to present what we'd committed to the week before.

The problem with this (beta) version of SharePoint compared to more traditional "from the ground up" development was that there were a million ways to “crack a nut” and hardly any of them had sufficient examples or documentation explaining how to do it. On top of that, it was also a very unstable beta build, so I’d lose days on something that should take a couple of hours.

At that time, the concept of "SharePoint 2007 best practices" was virtually non-existent.

After all-nighters, coupled with a relentlessly hard-working team, we finally made it and delivered a successful project. I still, to this day, don’t know how we pulled it off.

It was on that project that I met my business partner, Hugo. He was the tech lead, and we worked very closely together and was probably even more stressed than me. He had to lead and pick up the slack on dev that was falling behind.

During our lunch-time walks along the Thames, we'd talk and discuss plenty of technical challenges, but also reflect on personal points like:

• "There has to be a better way to get answers to our problems."
• "I miss my family!"

and the key one … which started Collaboris,

• "Surely, we can build a better life for ourselves by developing tools and add-ons that complement SharePoint".

That was the turning point! Even though it took a few more months, we decided to "go for it" and set-up Collaboris in September 2007.

After launching Collaboris, we developed an opensource framework for deploying SharePoint called (SAF) and also developed and sold DocRead for SharePoint to customers on 5 continents.

Although Collaboris was doing better than I had imagined it would, we still kept hitting roadblocks in our day-to-day business:

• It was really hard to keep up to date with what was changing in the Microsoft ecosystem. This got so much worse when Office 365 became prolific. Microsoft was no longer restricted to updating their software every 3 or 4 years, they now push changes out across 30 Office 365 services, almost daily.
• We found it hard to find external help. It turns out that people with “jedi powers” who are proficient with SharePoint are few and far between. If you needed someone for a day or two (as we often did), that was just an impossible task. This obviously meant we had to pick up the extra work, which detracted us from working on activities to drive the business forward.

When it was obvious that the race to the Cloud was inevitable and that Office 365 was not going to go away, we reached a big fork in the road for the business.

We had to decide between 2 approaches:

Option One: Do we port our "bread and butter" (DocRead and DocSurvey) to Office 365?

This was no small task. It would mean:

• Rewriting our flagship products,
• Becoming a SAAS company and hosting it on Azure.
• Committing to changing it as soon as Microsoft changed something in Office 365 that caused it to break.

Or,

Option Two: Do we try to build on our community activity and build new services to help people and businesses keep their skills current?

This meant we’d have to do a lot of development and decide how we can help people with Microsoft skills.

I can't tell you what a huge and downright scary decision this was.

The sensible voice in my head was saying, "Go build DocRead on Office 365," but the passionate voice was telling me, "Go do something you love. Go and help people who are in the same position as I was all those years ago".

If you fast-forward to today, you will by now, have realized we went for largely option 2. We are still committed to improving and supporting DocRead (on-premises), but our main goal as a business is now three-fold.

1. To help the Microsoft community learn together, collaboratively.

2. To help people like we were (as developers on that first SharePoint project) gain more freedom in their own freelance, self-sufficient careers.

3. To help businesses like ours who just want to find short-term Microsoft experts without a load of recruiting hassle.

We made that decision nearly 3 years ago and here's how it unfolded:

• We've now built Collab365 MicroJobs, our fully-fledged freelancer marketplace dedicated to serving those in need of short-term Microsoft skills. Google “Collab365 MicroJobs”.
• Since January 2018, we've also helped to educate 2.3 million people via our Blogs, Summits, Videos, and Directory. One of our Summits saw us travel to Redmond to stream live from MS HQ, which was a big highlight for me.
• We're nearly ready to release 365ers, our collaborative learning environment. 365ers will allow you to access all of our conference content, discuss, blog, communicate, and learn with your peers.

What are my key tips from the last 12 years?

For a person who is thinking of setting up as a business/freelancer:

• Research your idea. Find something that you are passionate about and that solves a genuine problem. Pick one thing and master it.
• Learn marketing. When we got going with Collaboris, neither of us knew anything about marketing. I transitioned and learned the basics of marketing which saw me immerse myself in funnels, paid ads, copyrighting, content marketing, email automation and way more. It was only at this point that we made sales.
• Don't do everything yourself. We're now dogfoodin’ MicroJobs ourselves and hiring freelancers to help us out where our technical skills/time fall short. We also get our more complex graphics done by freelancers. We are even getting our Facebook Ads created externally.

For a business running a Microsoft project:

• Stay up to date. With Microsoft’s release schedule, you can’t afford to hang on to your 4-year old skills. You will need to hire skilled people and attend regular refresher sessions. Your end-users expect the latest and greatest on offer (and Microsoft are making it easier for them to get it).
• Keep an eye on the future of work. I think big changes are coming, and I wrote a comprehensive post to share my thoughts. In short, the way you hire people will change. The way you work as a team will change.
• Consider using people for short term wins. You don’t have to do it all and you don't necessarily need to recruit, off-shore or outsource each and every time. We now use our own marketplace to find Microsoft skills when we need them.

Our strategy…

If you follow us, you can already see that these are the areas where we are trying to help both parties.

Free, valuable content:

We’re not going to stop putting out a lot of free content via services such as Collab365 Community, Facebook Groups, and Summits. Giving free content has always been important to us so we will continue.

Paid, current content:

If you want the most current content that teaches you how to solve common Microsoft problems, we will be introducing 365ers. This will be a paid service. We have some wonderful ideas on how to offer premium services and content, but we will need ways to cover the costs.

Done for you:

MicroJobs is our solution to help connect someone in need with someone with skills.

What’s coming up?

• Collab365 Summits. We're going to run four, five-day online conferences this year with the first being, GlobalCon1 (March 2-6). It's free and is 100% dedicated to Microsoft/Office 365. Register here.
• Collab365 MicroJobs. Last year saw us concentrate on making our Summit platform great. This year we’re going to be improving and telling the world about our wonderful Freelancers. Visit MicroJobs.
• 365ers. Penciled for a February launch. If you purchased an All-Access Pass (or spoke for us), you will be able to access it, read your Ebooks and watch your sessions. This is our paid service.

Do you have an origin story? I'd love to hear it.