How an IT specialist can understand what he is capable of beyond hiring, despite crazy fears and doubts
There are people who are easily drawn into adventures with business and their own projects. And then there are us – ordinary people who are afraid to go into the unknown. Of course, you can not go, but only overcoming this fear reveals our true selves and shows what we are capable of, and choosing a safe path makes us regret what was not done.
Here is the story of Kostya Davidenko. Kostya is a senior developer in a large corporation: he has a large salary, the opportunity to live anywhere in the world, and is in demand professionally. In short, everything except the understanding of what he is worth without a large corporation? What is he capable of without the usual corporate rails along which life rolls safely?
Many people want to know their potential, because working for hire only reveals a narrow range of possibilities. But most people do not dare to experiment with this
My name is Maxim Shishov, I help those who work for hire and want to launch their own project grow, as well as entrepreneurs whose business has hit a ceiling. We have been working with Kostya for more than half a year, and I am proud of our cooperation, because Kostya demonstrated the courage to be himself, which many people so desperately lack. And he also supplemented the article with his comments, which perfectly show what you feel when you go through such a transformation.
How it all began
Kostya approached me in November 2023 asking if I could help him: “figure out his personal goals and separate them from business goals” and “figure out his attitudes towards money and achieving goals.” We called each other, discussed all the issues, and Kostya said that he would come to me for mentorship. But…
And after the holidays Kostya writes.
I respect people who are honest about their doubts, because it is normal to doubt when you decide to make a big change. Jumping headlong into an unknown pool is not so good. But at the same time, if you read this message carefully, you will see the desire to protect the familiar life and betray the dream. The problem is that by not trying what you really want, you will pay an even greater price and regret the unrealized opportunities. It is in this vein that I answered.
As a result, we started working. The goal was:
This is a cool goal because many people find it difficult to step outside of their comfort zone and explore what activities they can do to find themselves and their potential.
When you work as a programmer, you don't worry too much about where to get money, because there is a lot of it, and you might get the impression that it will always be like this. But being an anxious person by nature, at some point I realized that I actually don't know how to do “anything else” except work, and if I don't start it, where will I earn my 300k per second? Oddly enough, this fear overcame the possibility of losing face with my “underproduct”, which didn't exist yet, and that's when we started working with Maxim.
Kostya Davidenko
What do I really want?
We started by trying to outline the new activity that Kostya would like to do. It's simple and difficult at the same time. Simple, because you already know yourself, you understand what you like and what you don't. And difficult, because usually these desires look vague, and fears prevent them from crystallizing.
One of the working methods is to remember the people you want to be like and understand what attracts you to them. Another is to evaluate what you are good at and what you like to do. The third is to understand the attitudes that prohibit you from doing what you like.
We discussed this during calls, and in between calls, I sent out assignments that helped to put together a complete picture.
As a result, Kostya came up with a list that caused him more fear than joy.
It is normal to feel dread when approaching something new and important to you, because it desperately conflicts with the old. A very important step at this stage is to make this new as visible and tangible as possible. This is the only way to appropriate it. And therefore it is important to first describe your project in a way that is understandable to clients.
Looking back at this task now, I clearly remember the emotions of “it's all in vain” and “what product can I offer when I'm nobody?” I think we all experience such emotions when we touch on something new. Going forward, at that moment it helped to trust the process and imagine that this is how it should be: scary, terrible, uncertain, but most importantly, not hopeless – this helped not to give up, to choose one most obvious idea and move on.
Kostya Davidenko
We describe the project and hide it in the drawer
We agreed with Kostya that since he responds most to the idea of mentoring in IT, we will take it into development and practice on it. We agreed that you don’t need to tie your whole life to mentoring, quit your job and sign blood oaths. Kostya will simply try himself in a new role of mentor for a year.
To do this, it was necessary to create a description:
Who is our client?
What requests do we work with?
How do we help clients achieve results?
Coming up with a description of a service from scratch is a real torture, since you have no idea what clients really need, what their requests are, what they already know how to do, and what they just want to learn.
It is not surprising that the first draft looked unconvincing and contained many general words. But this is an inevitable step and at this stage it is the norm. We looked at what other mentors were doing, clarified what clients Kostya would like to work with and what requests he could help them with. He made edits and posted the landing page on Tilda.
And I said, “Very good. But we won't show this version to clients. It's for you. Now go to potential clients and ask them what they really need.”
Why not just go to people? Because it's very useful to have a pre-formulated offer so you can test its relevance. This way, you can ask clarifying questions and dig much deeper into the customers' motivations than if you were to have an abstract conversation about what customers need in principle.
To be honest, at that moment I got angry at Maxim: “How can we not show this, did I just work for the drawer?” – clearly not used to this. After all, this doesn’t happen at work – I find a use for everything, I get results right away. And here it was only the first stage – research. The subconscious resisted the fact that “I’ll have to suffer more, I won’t get rid of it so quickly and it looks like this is only the beginning…”
Kostya Davidenko
Let's go to the people
The idea of going to the masses and asking people seemed scary at first, but I have immense respect for Kostya, he does it even if he is scared.
The great thing about communicating with potential clients is that it allows you to step out of your own fantasy bubble and see other people's needs: their difficulties, challenges, and desired results. This is useful for two reasons at once, and for any project:
You will be able to make an offer specifically for them if you are ready to work with the request.
You learn not to be afraid of people and to communicate with them calmly (for many introverts this is a separate problem)
In addition, in such research interviews, you can learn to identify a fair price. For example, ask: “Will you buy mentoring for 64,000? For 20,000? For 10,000?” This allows you to zero in on the market, understand how much people are willing to pay, and also calmly name your price. After all, you are not selling, you are just researching.
This moment when you had to go and ask “what do you need?”, the first conversation with a potential client – I consider it a turning point in our entire mentoring. It turns out that before making a product, you can go and ask if it is needed at all and in what form? At work, I rarely encountered this, because most often tasks come from business and it seems that any task is viable and important, it begins to seem that everyone in business is so smart that they immediately find an approach to the client. But it turns out – first you need to ask, amazing!
Kostya Davidenko
And now we sell!
Interviews are great and safe. They are a necessary step. But let's be honest, we want real money and real work with clients, which means we can't do without sales. However, it's not enough to sell, you'll need to fulfill your promise later, so you don't need to sell to everyone.
For mentoring to be effective, two conditions are needed:
A mentor must have a technology that helps achieve the goal (Kostya had it, because he only took on those requests that he understood what to do with)
The mentor must be sufficiently motivated and resourceful to achieve the result, because if a person does not want or cannot do what is required, no technology will help.
That’s why Kostya chose those guys whose experience and motivation gave him confidence that they would follow the recommendations, and made individual presentations for them, where he described their request and showed how he would help them solve their problem.
The power of such presentations is that they let you know how well you heard the client when you were interviewing them. If you did, people are interested in your offer and very often buy. This helps to improve the skill of listening carefully and understanding clients, and your ability to help them depends on it by 50%.
Like any responsible person, Kostya was worried that he would screw up and not be able to help the client. After all, he had never worked with people for money in this format and was inclined to devalue his experience of helping colleagues in the team. So he decided that if he couldn’t help, he would simply return the money.
Kostya continued to make presentations, but now each presentation took not a day, as it used to, but half an hour. And, finally, success happened!
But this is the first money earned without being hired, and that always blows my mind!
I have talked a lot with people who were hired their whole lives and then went freelance and earned their first rubles on their own. Without exception, everyone noted this experience as incredibly inspiring and mind-blowing: “Is that even possible?!”
Another great thing about sales is that the very fact of sales gives you confidence that your services are in demand and that you offer something valuable, since people are willing to pay you. Literally a few days later, there was a second sale, this time for 20,000 rubles.
The difficulty, however, was that these were all clients from the inner circle, and the inner circle is bad because it quickly ends. So we worked in parallel to attract new clients.
Although I was very happy about the first money I earned, at the same time I was perplexed that it was possible to earn it like this way. It took me a long time to get used to the idea that 7 or 20 thousand rubles earned without sweat and blood are undeserved and must be “worked off”. Luckily, there was Maxim who smiled and reassured me: “imagine, but people are ready to pay for what you help them.”
Kostya Davidenko
Where to look for clients?
A common problem that new entrepreneurs face is that they come up with a product and then scratch their heads: “Where can we find clients?” Sometimes the opposite strategy makes more sense: you come up with a product for clients you know exactly where to find.
Habr and VC are platforms where there are a lot of IT specialists, and I suggested that Kostya write an article that would describe the problems that Kostya himself faced and which he successfully dealt with.
A problem that many introverts are familiar with is the fear of interviews and lack of understanding of how to grow in the company. Many guys are afraid to ask for a raise, do not understand what to expect from interviews and get 100,000 rubles where they could earn 200,000 with the same level of skills that they already have.
We wrote the article in several iterations: we found a theme, sketched out a draft, sawed and refined it, polished the pictures and… finally!
By the way, first article slowly gained views because we added a survey, people took it but didn't write comments. Then the survey was removed and off it went.
The feeling of publishing the first articles is like a rocket launch. You come in every minute and look: “What did you write? Do they like/not like?” All these likes and comments generate very strong emotions, because it is always scary and exciting to show up and go public.
Then Kostya posted the article on VC. It got fewer views there, but it was still a great result. And for the first time, it was simply fantastic.
I was already hoping that we would publish article after article, but… But to date, this is the only article, since the creation process turned out to be more complicated than I thought.
How to work effectively with clients
At the same time, Kostya was forming his own framework for working with clients, since different requests required different approaches. For example, for long-term work, it was useful to write out a roadmap so that the client could see what knowledge he needed to gain in order to pass an interview, etc.
Working with clients motivated us to make another approach and talk to other mentors to find out what requests they receive, what tools they use in their work, what difficulties they face and how they solve them.
Seeing how others work and comparing it to my own experience was useful not only because it helped me work more effectively with clients. These conversations helped me crystallize my own positioning.
I remember how the guy who records cool reels answered me: “sure, let’s chat!” During the conversation, I began to notice that when talking to a more experienced colleague, I notice a lot of new things for myself, and besides, some questions made him think about how he works and what problems he solves.
I liked this new dynamic, that it's not just me who gets and demands something from the other, but that we both find cool topics in conversation, help each other look at things from different angles. So if you're afraid to communicate with more experienced colleagues, consider this a sign, they are more often than not ready to help you (and you will also help them), you don't “disturb” them with your questions!
Kostya Davidenko
Crystallization of positioning
The problem with the vast majority of experts and businesses is that they either don’t understand what they do really well or they don’t communicate it. As a result, they struggle to attract attention and their offerings look exactly the same as competitors' offers.
If you remember Kostya's first landing page (which we didn't show to clients), it only contained rough drafts of positioning. Now that Kostya had his own practice, when he was convinced that he was helping clients, and understood what kind of clients he wanted to work with, he had 2 directions:
For beginners
Naturally, Kostya specified the proposal only after a free call and took on only those people with whom he wanted to work and when he was sure that he could help.
At that moment, the idea became more and more clear to me that the narrower the audience I take – Java developers with at least 1 year of experience who want to change jobs – the easier it is for me to offer them something. Although it would seem that I know so much, and I can help everyone, but this idea only confuses, because you can't help everyone at once: different people need different solutions.
Kostya Davidenko
One step forward and two steps back
The last thing I want you to get is the impression that the results came easily, without effort or setbacks. We spent a lot of time discussing resistance and fears. Judging what helps us cope with them and what prompts us to quit. Most of our efforts were successful, but not always.
In fact, my job is not so much to show the way, but to help you walk it when the barriers seem insurmountable.
Results and personality transformation
In six months, Kostya learned to do many things that he had not dared to do before:
Write to strangers and conduct in-depth interviews
Create a clear offer of your services
Sell your services
Write to mentors and bloggers that I thought were cool and interview them
Create articles that are interesting to tens of thousands of people
News telegram channel
This is cool in itself (it took me about 5-6 years, because I was the smartest and did not turn to any mentors), but these are external changes. And they became possible only thanks to internal changes, much more important, although less visible.
Behind every decision – to create your own offer, to declare yourself, to sell, to take responsibility for helping others – there are many experiences:
shame “What will they think of me? What if they decide that I'm some kind of info-gypsy?”
fear “What if it doesn't work out? What if I'm not capable of anything?”
anxiety “How will my friends react?”
resistance “Nothing is working out, I’ll put this task aside and do something familiar”
devaluation “Do I need it at all?”
Courage and character are not shown in making a landing page, courage is shown in taking responsibility for your decision and, despite anxiety, fear, shame and resistance, bringing the matter to a result
I really like this text by psychologist Ilya Latypov, because it accurately describes the price people pay when they decide to go beyond their usual boundaries:
If you have never lost your self-respect because of your own misdeeds, cowardice or stupidity, you have not truly lived. If you have not disgraced yourself publicly many times, if you have not gone somewhere to hide from people because of great shame – then you have not tried to live, going beyond the boundaries outlined once in the distant past. If you have never deceived trust – it means there was no trust to deceive. If you do not have a handful of regrets and feelings of guilt for something that was or was not done in the past – it means you have not even tried to do something on your own, preferring the rut beaten by someone else. If you have never been humiliated – it turns out that you have not tried to raise your head. If you have never offended anyone in the heat of the moment or out of cold hatred, it seems that you have learned to be unnoticeable and invisible, and that’s it… This entire path, beautifully called “development,” is strewn with this “ass,” and we are so saturated with it that only those who have successfully escaped life can claim holiness, and still think that medals and candies are due for the right thoughts and words.
Ilya Latypov
Trying your hand outside of hiring is always a powerful transformation of personality simply because it is impossible to rely on the orders of big uncles and aunts and say “we were told so”. And I am very glad that I am accompanying Kostya on this journey to a bold and free version of his personality, he inspires me not to give in to my own obstacles. I am also glad that the skills that Kostya received are universal. They will come in handy in hiring and in any other project or business, if mentoring ever gets boring.
What I take away today is the skill of creating a product: collecting information about what people need in general and in what form, writing offers and pre-sales while the product is not ready yet. And also the confidence that, in fact, if I want and I really need it, I can help colleagues with my experience, a broad view of the world and my support. It is a very liberating feeling to see that everything in the world works on this framework: there is a problem and there are people who find a solution. Seeing that I can do this now too is an invaluable skill that I will take with me into life!
Kostya Davidenko
If you want to launch your project, but don’t know how best to do it — write to mewe'll call each other and make a plan that will help change the situation. You can also check out my channel In spite ofwhere I write about how to recognize subtle mental traps and achieve your goals despite unfavorable circumstances. The next big post will be about why many people feel like they can't cope with life, and what to do about it. Take a look.
