One thing that I will need to focus on this year is increasing my client rosta for my freelancing business. With just a handful of clients at the moment, I definitely have enough work to keep me going for the foreseeable future, but what happens when the work for those clients dries up? At the moment I have enough savings to see me through a few months of absolutely zero work, but that's not the fallback plan I had in mind.

Before I actually find clients though, I need to determine what value I can offer these clients, and that's where I need to start work. Approaching clients is one thing, but unless I can sell something of value then I am definitely not going to appeal to anyone.

Technical Value

Looking back at the last year of work, it's clear that my strengths now lie in the following stack for web development:

1. Heroku for application hosting.
2. Ruby on Rails as my chosen web development framework.
3. Cucumber and RSpec as a testing stack I'm well versed in but I would actually prefer to be digging more into MiniTest, the test library that is now included in Ruby.

Selling this as a value though could be done with testimonials from my current customers, as well as showcasing some of the web sites that I have worked on over the last year.

The other option for displaying my value on this topic would be to write a book on one aspect of my development stack. I am leaning towards Heroku as a favoured choice having seen very little books in the past on Heroku. However Heroku is such a well documented service, would I be simply duplicating the docs that Heroku have? I would need to provide something more than the basic docs. Tips and strategies on getting more from Heroku while being able to keep costs down would be a good place to begin.

Knowledge Value

As for the my specialised field, I've been building web applications in the healthcare sector for the last 12 months. It's a sector I'm very experienced in having previously worked in the NHS and also having worked for a software provider whose main customer was the NHS.

For a product idea, I am currently building a CMS targeted at GP surgeries in the UK. The proving ground for this product is going to be the GP surgery where my wife is the practice manager. While building the CMS for this practice, I'll be able to get invaluable feedback from my wife who will be the administrator for the site.

Having this knowledge of the health sector would allow me to focus my attention on chasing clients similar to this. While many developers might have the technical skills that match mine, I will be the more valuable option for having the knowledge of the sector to help these clients.

I'm definitely not setting this in stone as the only two options for the year, but it's a start. I'm putting an emphasis on these two forms of value, as I am trying to attract clients that are looking for either of these forms of value, but it would be ideal if they needed both.