I think there are some benefits to that idea Matt, but it's perhaps a
little more complex than it sounds.

If the team is just an anonymous pool of freelancers with no particular
branding, they you'll all be treated as such by the clients. It'd be much
like using odesk or some other service designed to connect programmer with
client, with the assumption that the programmer is a mindless cog in the
machine and can be replaced by any one of a million other such identical
cogs if the client feels like it or if the programmer wants too much money.

So, to avoid that fate, one essentially needs to market a brand that says
"we are a pool of rails contractors and we're all awesome". That's pretty
similar to the brand of any rails contracting company. Running a company
entails a bit of work, so I think that perhaps you're aiming for more of a
service where the contractor bills the client directly, but the "pool" of
developers provides some extra advantages for the client, such as the
ability to bring more resources in, or also to get replacement resources if
a developer is unavailable. Such a concept would be totally possible to
market, but still the theme "we are a pool of rails contractors and we're
all awesome" would need to have a strong presence.

In fact, it's probably not just the clients who would need to be convinced
of that theme. The developers would too. If you're going to put effort into
promoting the pool, instead of just yourself, then you're going to need to
be sure that:

1. The pool does not have disproportionately more developers in it than the
available work. Ie, if the pool is getting work, then you should be getting
enough work individually as part of that.
2. The other developers in the pool are awesome enough that you don't mind
your reputation being averaged with theirs to some degree, at least when
clients consider the pool brand/identity.

The latter might be able to be mitigated slightly by ensuring that the pool
also brands the individual developers a fair bit too, but the former really
depends on having a closed membership policy, and only accepting new
developers to the pool when it becomes clear there is sufficient work (of
if they bring clients with them).

Another approach to thinking that all the developers are awesome is to
divide the developers into 2 or 3 different levels of experience, and
present that to the clients as slightly different levels of awesomeness and
thus hourly rate. Thus, a senior developer doesn't feel that their
reputation is reduced by having junior developers in the pool, because the
junior developers are identified as such, and although paid slightly less,
can presumably access mentoring and so forth through the pool.

Having said all that, the idea could be really interesting. I've dabbled in
co-branding with others a few times. I worked loosely with Cogent
Consulting for a while, (now Cogent Co), but much of their work is on-site
and specific to Melbourne. Neither party got much branding benefit out of
the relationship. When I started freelancing, there didn't seem to be a
heap of rails freelancers around and I got significant benefit just from
being one of those willing to take the risk. I know plenty of you have
walked a similar road and have plenty of consulting under your belts. Some
folks have gone off and formed successful consulting companies, but most of
those have been geographically based. Those of us who steadfastly wish to
continue working from wherever we happen to be are stuck either going it
alone, or managing to build some rare shared brand which doesn't look like
anonymous overseas outsourcing, and yet does involve working-from-home
consultants.

Craig

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