I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.
Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.
Still working with them 6 years later.
I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!
The last time I mentioned this I got downvoted into a crater, so maybe ppl hate it (I'm open to hearing counterpoints!) but there's an army of tech freelancers swapping advice in a slack called "Rands Leadership Slack". My old boss suggested it. I thought it was BS. It was surprisingly informative - case in point it's where I first heard of the above podcast.
I suspect part of it is also just visibility. You can't be hired, if people don't know about you. Being active in a community gives pretty large visibility surface area, while still being able to provide genuine value & build relationships.
yes, i believe that's very true. the challenge now is for me to figure out what the best places are to be visible on.
programming language forums are good when they are growing and there is more demand than can be satisfied. i was in a group like that and it worked well for a while.
i think potentially small business forums should be good. a least when i want to target small businesses.
> any recommendations or other suggestions?
Sure, but not any you should really deeply pay attention to :)
Targeting small businesses can be good and fun, for a variety of reasons. It's just... small business mean everything from rivet manufacturers to real estate agents. The more generalised you are, the less you can set yourself apart.
The more focused you are, the more you begin to understand your market / audience - what matters to them, common problems, financial cycles, the overall network etc - the better you can serve them (including making actual products for them). This creates a positive feedback loop... over a long period of time. Years, probably (at least it was for me. I started from scratch in the web dev space, it's taken about 4 years to get to a 'good' financial position with nice clients).
I've begun specialising in web-tech-for-hardware (so not embedded, but web tech focused around accessing, commissioning, controlling embedded devices by non-engineers), and providing the supporting software for those (web apps with serial support, manufacturing test systems, in-field mobile apps to access & setup devices when there's no internet). It's niche, but I thought it was a good field because I also like UI/UX design, and I felt it's something embedded engineers aren't great at.
I originally started my career in the embedded space (before taking a detour into the business world), so I guess it gave me enough of a leg up to understand just enough parlance to talk shop. Not enough to really build anything, but to know what UART or I2C are, to know to poke fun at PLCs, the difficulty with soldering LGA/BGAs, why performance and low power matter, etc etc. This builds trust... but that's a by-product. I genuinely enjoy the space and like the people, so I guess that comes across too.
Maybe instead of focusing on a technical field, if you're interested in helping small businesses, see if they have any industry groups or bodies you can join + conferences you can attend. Be the guy in the room that has the skills they don't have. There might be lots of more competent engineers out there (certainly true for me), but in my case I'm the only guy I know that's willing to be in _this_ particular space.
I've seen variants of this a few times. Being publicly helpful is a good way to get business. Need a lawyer to help with a specific case? You'll probably hire the person who's active in your community, or who wrote a helpful blog post about it.
General consultancy is an extremely crowded space. As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
My advice would be to differentiate yourself:
- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.
- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.
- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you
I endorse this. I've been doing generalist consulting for about six years, and I love flying solo. I've been successful in landing some big customers and interesting projects, but I'm tired of the inefficiency that comes with being a generalist, so I've decided to specialize vertically.
I had a super-interesting project in executive search in the last couple years, and I've decided to settle around that area: executive search and recruitment firms. Maybe later, as an extension I'll target other B2B, relationship-driven professional service firms tha share a common core of processes.
I've only recently pivoted but I'm already starting to see the fruits. It's commercially efficient. Many potential customers seem happy to open the door and chat. I know where to find them, online and off. And then it's operationally efficient. I'm confident I could jump on a customer project and recognize most of their processes and systems immediately and have a quick impact. I already have a base of IP (documented business procedures, code, etc.) and only intend to grow it in the coming years and even turn it into a "productized service".
I think people refuse to specialize for three main reasons. The first is for lack of a clear thesis. That's fine, you need to explore for a bit. The second is for a fear of lack of opportunities, which is often unfounded. The third is due to psychological reasons related to the image of self. On this last one I can only advise that (a) even in specialization there is way more variety than you think, (b) you can always keep growing as a generalist with side projects and self-directed learning and (c) nothing is ever fixed in stone, everything is in flow - you can always pivot out into other interesting directions.
I used to fear specialization because of a form of commercial or career FOMO. The reality is you instead get spread to thin and are (ironically?) now at risk of being displaced by "good enough" AI solutions. If you are a generalist you still need to be "T-shaped" with a few areas of deeper expertise. Funny enough your expertise could be getting things done-done using all your generalist abilities (ex: able to take initial ideas all the way to a active, viable business).
How? This is what I never understood. Every domain expert I’ve ever knowing is because they’ve already
I can spend all the time I have reading and toying around in a subject, but until I have real concrete experience to guide me, it’s usually pretty difficult to become an “expert” in anything. I know how to become an advanced hobbyist, but thats never in my life translated to someone being willing to pay me over say, and already established expert
I've drifted across projects in different industries (FMCG, investment funds, ad agencies, startups of various sorts) and like I said I had a long project (over two years) for an executive search firm and got to see the ins and outs of how everything works from strategy to technology. I could be drifting to find clients in yet another vertical but I've decided to stay put for at least a few years. So to answer your question, in my particular case: I drifted, stumbled upon something by chance, and then took a conscious decision to stay.
If you're a dev, one approach to specialization is to align with the tooling associated with common "profit center" processes. Become a Salesforce/Hubspot/Odoo/Shopify developer. If you're not interested in developing, you can specialize in learning one specific ecosystem really well and then teach companies -- typically SMBs -- how to set themselves up and organize their operations around it.
This seems all good and well 10 years ago, but how well does this survive when the actual SMEs can just use LLMs to achieve the same effect? Those are the sort of platforms going all in on that stuff.
This can help and hurt. E.g. if you run a very successful Shopify plugin, you risk Shopify implementing it natively and wiping you out in one fell swoop.
"Executive search and recruitment firms" is an industry/segment, though, right? I thought this comment was more about specializing in some particular niche tech thing wrt the "just start a open source project guysss" comment
Specialization works by vertical or by function. Or you can actually mix them if your TAM remains large enough.
Yes, the parent was referring to technical specialization. But my point is either works. Especially in the context of what OP is trying to do which is "automation" - technically very broad.
+1 about overseas freelancers. And US customer to European freelancer is not the arb it used to be. The California SaaS sector has collapsed in the wake of venture capital rotating into AI-native, saas budgets (salaries) are down, the dollar is down, and remote European salaries are up. Zoom latency across 7-8h timezone difference is workable, the current arb is to hire from further and further east. Unless there is a war disruption such as an attack on the trans Atlantic internet pipes.
I know, I just don't see the arbitrage in what's described? If I order online because it's cheaper than the high street, that's not an arbitrage – the arbitrage would include then selling it on the high street afterwards, getting paid to close the gap until it reflects only delivery fees and the value of immediacy.
And to make that an arbitrage you'd need to subcontract someone local to do the job you've taken the California pay for. It doesn't mean 'get a better deal in a non-obvious way/place', it's taking both sides of the trade in different markets.
Good point about the project lifecycle. In my experience, open source contributions often get repurposed this way. The key is clear licensing from the start.
>>I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
One place hired me thinking I could fix some software they farmed out to India. I was not aware of that when they hired me. Afterwards they said they wanted it fixed in two weeks and fired me when I told them it wasn't possible. The software was in a language I'd never used on hardware I never programmed for.
They hired someone locally who was something of an expert in the area who claimed he could fix it in a month. It took him six months to fix the problems.
They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.
Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.
Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.
> As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
This is why cold outreach is rarely effective. Until you’ve seen it, you don’t realize the volume of incoming freelancing pitches coming from all of the freelancers. It’s getting worse with AI automation, now.
Any real networking at all will set you apart. It has to be more than sending someone a LinkedIn request because that’s what all of the other agencies are doing too. You have to establish yourself as a real and trusted person.
Re cold outreach: it depends. The bar is abysmally low, and most outreach is just an untargeted spam cannon. Don't be like those people.
If you manage to make the outreach warmer, it can work surprisingly well. I built a tool to identify high-intent leads on LinkedIn which gets me acceptance rates of 60%+ by finding people that comment on relevant content to my niche: https://www.getibex.com
I don't consult anymore, but for an extended period I did so at a premium rate and as an independent. I remember a hiring manager's boss saying something to me like "I could get 2 or more consultants for the same money" and I replied, " I don't really see myself as competing with those organizations, but if you can get the job done it makes sense to take that path." It was both cocky and true (not sure today-me would say that). The thing I understood well was that differentiating as a skilled individual makes you much harder to displace; there are countless "$TECH programmer with N years of experience in $FOOBAR" while there are very few "$YOU".
2 and 3 are great but 1 will not work great if you're a consultant, unless the 1 thing is broad enough to have actual demand that you can tap into. Finding that 1 thing is also extremely challenging, esp. if you're trying to make it the main revenue play. I can be the world's leading expert on Brainfuck, but that doesn't mean I'll get my bills paid. It's much better to be the "I can call this guy to figure out whatever I need to figure out" person than "this guy only does X well, I'm not sure if i need that, might have to hire the general guy to figure this out first" guy.
My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.
I'm a web developer / designer-lite (amongst other things in previous lives), and have embedded myself as the web-tech guy for an embedded / hardware team. I help provide better customer facing interfaces (through websites, apps, etc) to both end users and manufacturer that the company uses.
I've made small, simple tools that can be packaged up along in a device's flash (it's ~2KB), that allows a user to interrogate the device via serial, capture all the commands + responses, & trivially email them to an engineer. It's designed for troubleshooting devices remote, without needing to ship JLink's or debuggers or what not to clients. It's a very small thing, but it's cool to hear people using it to help troubleshoot with users, in a way that's much simpler than trying to jump on the phone with them & guess what they're seeing on their screen.
I also specifically help make manufacturing test systems which sit closer to a web-app like experience (in terms of usability and visuals), because I've observed that providing end-of-line manufacturing staff with poorly cludged together test systems leads to a bunch of errors which don't need to exist (they're often just quickly thrown together CLIs, which are unpleasant to use and buggy all round - especially for less tech savvy manufacturing staff).
I also happen to really like embedded engineers, they're fun to hang around with - and I get genuine satisfaction out of being able to help them out in areas they haven't specialised in.
Sadly, all of this stuff is a commodity. The market is flooded with such "experts." I'm not saying you aren't better than all of them, you may very well be, it is just very hard to differentiate.
I think you're right that it would be hard to differentiate.
I don't think there are many actual experts though, experts as in the people your developers call when they can't figure it out themselves. But the marked is probably small-ish, and there's a large effort to become a real expert.
Becoming an expert in one thing also narrows down the potential suitable work tremendously. Also these days nobody wants to pay the expert prices since.. Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)
Usually experts are T shaped. Acquiring expertise always means the time spent is away from learning something else.
The deeper and greater the expertise the more niche the topic usually becomes and the less demand there is.
The world might need X million web developers but how many experts are there in browser technology. Or even experts in that domain something more niche like rendering or rendering niche like Angle and WebGL..you already go this deep and it boils down to a handful of individuals.
Also I didn't say that there would not be demand just that many businesses are not willing to pay for it anymore. Industry layoffs, AI are huge leverages that any potential employer can use to have all the advantage when negotiating compensation.
The T shape is important - but the base of the T doesn't have to be in tech. If you're an expert in a particular niche and a generalist in a particular business you'll find work.
E.g., a web developer who knows a lot about how lawyers run their business.
Even if it's true that AI can replace an expert, and I really don't think it is, except in the simplest minds, the AI training companies are aggressively hiring experts...
> Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)
Opus is far better at most surface-level tasks than it is at tasks that require deep knowledge and understanding of domains; someone who is a complete generalist (who thus has only surface level knowledge in many, many things) is far more replaceable with LLMs than someone who has deep knowledge in one.
Consider the way LLMs actually are created; they are not created from billions of repos with deep knowledge behind them. The majority of their knowledge comes from a massive amount of surface-level work that's been done and can be sampled from: React starter templates, starter templates + what little customization someone needed, blog-tutorial-level stuff.
It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth. This (obviously?) implies the risk of targeting a narrower market, and the upside of being more attractive to that smaller population. It's a typical "quality over quantity" tradeoff.
To say there's no "sliver of truth" in pointing that out (let alone w/ an unwarranted jab about projecting fears) is... strange and maybe hypocritical. TLDR your response came across as emotional and passive-aggressive, and confusing.
> It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth
I do not necessarily agree with this as stated. A specialist will have access to many roles within their speciality that are not open to a generalist. The market for generalists without deep expertise is also extremely crowded.
How? I had a set of letterhead/envelopes/business cards printed up. I had already been "hanging-out" in the local electronics surplus stores, where they also sold used computer parts and the like. Stacked around the cash registers in these stores at that time were business cards. Various specialists. So I kept my own maintained stack of cards in my two main goto-stores, and I was friends with the register clerks, and had them handing out my cards on occasions when somebody came in the store and wanted help with "something". After 8 months of doing this, and being flat-broke, the day before Christmas, somebody telephoned off of my business card, and asked if I could do something. He brought some sample stuff, and I accepted a $200-per week retainer from him (I was really good at budgeting and that was what I had been getting for UEI until it ended). He had brought his checkbook with him, and wrote me a check. That started my personal word-of-mouth network and kept me going for a few decades.
Been at this 10 years. My top tip is if you’re doing cold outreach, kickstart the value exchange by giving something first without asking for anything in return.
A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.
It doesn’t need to be a big give - an actionable plan for a small system improvement they can give to someone internal to implement, for example, is fine.
Another tip is to highlight the problem with a loom video/recording of some sort. That way they’ve seen and heard you too. This builds instant trust and a feeling of knowing the person behind the business straight away.
> A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.
Can you give a more specific example from your recent experience?
(My point is: this sounds like very plausible sounding advice, until you try to apply this to a producer of steel ball bearings located in Upper Austria, just outside of Linz)
My approach is to break the project into small milestones — especially in the beginning — and align the incentives.
Put bluntly, I design it so I can't lose, and neither can my client. I design it so even in an adversarial, zero trust environment, the relationship and arrangement still makes sense.
In practice this looks like, I do a bit of work up front, ship a demo within the first week, if they're happy, they pay, it becomes theirs, and we continue working together.
I also choose projects I actually like, and that align with my goals, so even if I get hosed, I had fun and learned cool things. (But keeping milestones small minimizes the cost of getting hosed, for both parties :)
I do freelance consulting alongside building my own product.
My first clients came through a friend who connected me with people that needed someone to maintain a mobile app and its backoffice. Thats it. No cold outreach, no fancy strategy, just someone who knew what I could do and made the intro. I think most engineers underestimate how much work comes from just telling people around you what you do.
For getting more visibility I started writing about what I'm building on LinkedIn, sharing technical decisions, things I got wrong. People reach out from that. Not a flood but enough
One thing I'd warn about: consulting can eat your whole schedule if you let it. I had to put hard boundaries around my consulting hours because my own product was getting zero attention. Now I treat consulting as the thing that pays the bills while I build the thing I actually care about. If you dont set that boundary early you wake up in 2 years running a consultancy you never wanted.
My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.
Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.
On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.
As someone who went to work for a commercial software consultancy company early in my career, I am looking to follow in your footsteps. In consultancy, projects are over for me when my work is done. Rarely do I get to see the results. I want to work at a product company next.
It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).
My history is all pretty public on the blog, but tl;dr write every day, don't be a coward re: topic, and work hard at writing well. It's easier than ever to meet cool people in tech through writing since almost everyone is spamming nonsense on AI.
I'm doing this right now -- AI automation for small businesses, started on Upwork about two months ago. The thing that actually moved the needle was writing proposals that were basically free mini consultations. Someone posts about needing their spreadsheet workflow automated, I'd write back describing their exact problem back to them and how I'd wire it up with n8n, what the timeline looks like, what usually goes wrong. No "I have 10 years of experience" stuff.
Took about 6 weeks to get 5 reviews. Before that I was competing on rate against people charging $15/hr and it was miserable. After the reviews landed I bumped from $70 to $95 and nobody pushed back. The reviews changed the entire dynamic of the conversation.
Curious of what kind of workflows you end up working with and setting up? I am trying to figure out what I can automate in my work but I don't know if I have much.
Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.
Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.
Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.
Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)
I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.
This 100%.
Just to give another viewpoint on this, having just started going full time on my solo agency, I actually love doing the sales and marketing stuff and scoping the work for clients. Yes, it does take a lot of time away from pure technical work but I do enjoy the balance of it. So, it does depend on your own interests and how you like to spend your time. Freelancing/Consulting is definitely not for everyone. And tbh, lets see maybe in a year or two I will be fed up of the sales/marketing stuff too.
One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.
I did similar stuff for many years (and sometimes still do). By far the most effective was going and meeting people in adjacent or similar fields and making sure they knew about me.
My favourite was helping scientists - not the highest paying gigs, but the most interesting work and sometimes it led to great ongoing relationships as their go to tech person.
I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting, and after that, they go into paid discovery at a lower rate than your full rate, out of which they get a technical persons documentation of the problem to solve. This approach definitely worked the best for me in the long run.
>I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting,
that is still a freebie, though, by definition. if you offer anything for free, it is a freebie.
and, offering a freebie does not necessarily signal desperation. i am not saying that one should not offer freebies, or even that one should. it all depends. and many variations are possible.
I worked on an open source application, and some people wanted to use parts of it as a library in their commercial applications. So I started a consultancy due to that demand. I still had a regular job at the same time though, so there was never a need to gather enough clients to make a living out of the consultancy job.
Things I learned:
- Get an accountant ASAP, even if the income is small. Just the peace of mind that my taxes were being filed correctly was worth the cost.
- You don't need a perfect solution from the start, you are working with your client towards something they can use.
- You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.
- Almost all clients wanted me to either come work for them or sell all (rights of) my work to them. This is understandable from their side, but if you want to stay independent you need to set some boundaries.
>You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.
you have to tell them that they have to communicate regularly too. otherwise, how can business be done. how can issues be sorted out. they will blame you for the issues later, although they did not discuss them with you. aka cya syndrome.
if they continue not to do it, you should fire them. or use reverse signoff protocol.
"we mutually agreed at the start of this engagement, that if you don't sign off on acceptance of a given deliverable within x days, it is understood that you have accepted it and will pay for it".
If it happens more than once, leave them. it indicates they don't take you seriously.
all such terms should be put in the contract, initially.
if they don't agree to such mutually protective terms, don't sign the contract at all.
I get basically all my contract work through folks I've worked with in the past. With a little luck, your network slowly diffuses across the industry, and when they need a heavy-hitter, they know who to call
I started freelancing over 10 years ago, and I got my first freelance project through an acquaintance from my former dorm in Copenhagen. After that I got several different freelance jobs through recruiters on LinkedIn. But it was a different time, as the cliché goes. One thing to know about highly paid freelance positions is that they are extremely cyclical. These are positions that mainly exist because the market is booming and screaming for labor, and when that's not the case, companies will much, much prefer to have permanent employees.
In the time before COVID and up until its end, the tech market was booming, but when the economic stimulus ended and interest rates rose, the tech market shrank and the freelance market in Berlin/Germany (and probably Denmark too) has never really recovered. The positions simply aren't there, only very few that many fight over. The great thing about being a freelancer before was that you were almost treated like a rock star, recruiters contacted you all the time, and you could pick and choose.
If you don't have a large network, you can try signing up with different recruiters and see what they have to offer. You might be lucky if you live in regions with less competition and where clients are looking for someone local to work on-site. Getting hired these days also requires that you have (substantial) experience and can show some projects.
(By the way, I’m looking for a permanent position—preferably in Copenhagen—as the bank requires this to approve my loan application. Here is my resume just in case: https://lasse.sometechblog.com/)
What worked for me was getting the identity before the proof. I did work shaped like consulting before I called it consulting. Weekend hours for a friend's startup, teardowns of companies I liked, one-page analyses published publicly. None of it paid anything. All of it left a trail of specific outputs.
The friction on the first paid project wasn't finding the client. It was eliminating the need for them to take a risk on me, because they could see I'd been producing at that caliber for a year. The market caught up to the identity, not the other way around.
how do you do that? how do you get the details about the company for that? i look at company websites, i usually only find marketing stuff but not really anything useful to tell me what's inside.
i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.
Referrals from the first 2-3 clients were everything. But to get those first clients — LinkedIn outreach with a very specific message about their problem worked better than anything else. Generic 'I am available for work' messages got ignored completely.
how do you find out about the problems though? i haven't come across anything like that on linkedin. and if it is not there, then i wouldn't even know where else to look. their website? their blog? people/companies generally don't write about their problems. even in job descriptions here usually isn't anything about the problems they want to solve.
If you'd like visibility, I pay experienced developers a small fee to write educational articles on software infrastructure. While you cannot write about your own projects, your byline in the article is a good place to say that you're looking for work (employment or contract).
I'm close to finishing a fairly complex and laborious Elixir bridge to SQLite (through Rust) and I loved the journey. Maybe I should contact you and write an article. Hmm.
I hangout on a few Slack groups (Elixir, Ruby, etc), got quite a few projects this way as the founders were looking for experienced consultants.
It also helps if you could show either/both:
* a portfolio / clients you've worked with
* open source / "street-cred"
When I was looking for projects I always attach my Github profile (https://github.com/fredwu) to show my open source contributions, and also the SaaS products I've built myself (https://wuit.com/), and if clients are looking for C-level / strategic-level help, I also attach my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/), these help build up your reputation and stand out amongst many freelancers also looking for projects.
I just had a very quick glance at your site - there seems to be a lot of text, mostly focused on what you can offer. But what's missing is... who are you? What have you done?
This is solid advice. I'd add that community presence matters more than you might think—but it has to be genuine. Hanging out in Slack groups and actually helping people (without immediately pitching) builds real relationships. When you do mention you're consulting, people already know your work quality.
The portfolio/OSS combo is key because it removes risk. Clients can see what you actually ship, not just what you claim. Even small open source contributions help more than you'd expect.
One thing missing: referrals. Your first few clients are the hardest. But if you do good work, they'll refer others. That becomes your growth engine pretty quickly, so don't treat early clients as one-offs.
I was a Java programmer and administered a fairly big community website written in Drupal as a side gig, then applied to a news company that used Drupal, out of curiosity.
Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.
Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.
Identify who your buyer is. It’s probably not a technical person (and thus HN isn’t a great place to advertise).
Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)
For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.
So unlike some folks, I’m still very much reliant on $DAYJOB for the majority of my income. But I managed to carve out a niche in an unexpected place.
OS/2 consulting
It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.
I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.
I work at a small consulting firm that focuses on business software. My best consultants are not programmers by trade. Some worked up from help desk to IT Manager or CTO, some were accountants and learned enough about ERP imports they took a leap. A good way to do this is to work at a consulting firm. You will learn within a few years how to deal with dozens to hundreds of clients, how to keep an organized client file, manage quoting, billing or delivery of projects from end to end. How do deal with upset customers, how to close a sales call, you will do it all and you will be constantly learning. You will implement a client at one company that works and call up another company and pitch them the same idea, software or tool (I have clients doing AI.....) or whatever it is.
You will become tool agnostic. you will see to the end. you will find tools to do it.
So a good way to go independent is to go into a consultancy based business - you will get a feel for AR, AP, contracts and so forth in a way that you won't really often see at a service provider, ISP, software company or SaaS tech company.
The best is proof of work. If you don't have any, build something and show that off. Even listing out the companies you have worked for will be good. Cold email could work if its not completely "cold", i.e, find companies/people who are in the space/industry where you have worked so that they can see you have solved a similar problem before. 10+ years of software engineering is quite valuable, you just have to present yourself in a way where the value can be seen.
Also, never, ever work for free. One, your time is worth more than you think. Second, it makes you sound a bit less serious and less valuable and you will attract clients that are not fun to work with. Not worth your time at all. The only people who MAYBE should be working for free are students who are in high school.
I have been freelancing on and off on the side for the past 8 years and this year pulled the plug and going full time on it and tbh I am now oversubscribed. So, there's definitely a need for it.
My first few clients (8 years ago) were through posting on reddit (/r/forhire) and then also on the monthly HN freelancer thread (was shocked they stopped doing that, I have gotten 2 solid clients from those!).
I made monkeys.zip - a project that was completely useless and reflects my interests and skills, and people have reached out with creative projects since
In your case, bike or drive around and talk to SMEs in your city. Have friends refer you to their contacts, so it's a warm intro. Build software for free, and maintain it on an annual maintenance contract basis. "Value-price" each AMC. Initially, be fine with "leaving money on the table". Within two to three deals you will figure out a mutually profitable pricing strategy.
I have been a solo contractor for little over 15 years now. This was my goal all along and it did not happen overnight. My path was more organic, I was a W2 for quite some time and in that time I had one personal focus - become more valuable to the company than they are to you. I took on tasks everyone was running away from, I changed code which was preceded by comments like “// DO NOT TOUCH THIS OR COMPANY WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS” and after so time every big thing that was needed or every customer fire/emergency needed me. I was even called into an emergency meeting on my honeymoom :)
once I was comfortable I am fairly indispensible part of the business I submitted my resignation along with an offer to continue working as an independent contractor which was swiftly accepted. once I got this first (and as steady as it gets) thing everything went much smoother after this, word of mouth mostly and I went to a lot of meetups (especially pre covid) from where I got a number of contracts too
*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.
People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.
I've been a team lead in software delivery for 15+ years at an agency. The "solo project" path started differently for me: I built an internal tool because the existing options didn't solve my problem. Measuring flow metrics from Jira turned out to be something other teams wanted too.
What helped: solving my own problem first, open sourcing it, and writing about the domain (flow metrics, delivery performance) rather than the tool itself.
3 quick (and true) stories that helped me when I was in a similar situation (started my own thing in 2024). Currently have 6 clients and 9 employees (which wasn’t the plan!)
1. Embrace the bizarre. You need your first client, not a repeatable go to market motion. Once you have a client, you can begin to work on getting clients and figuring out what type of work you want to do longer-term. My first client was a friend who owned a business, knew enough about technology to scratch the surface and was willing to pay $5k for me to coach him. He had to write all the code and I agreed to monthly coaching until he was able to get his site in production. Terrible economics but earned real money and that’s the point of your first client - it legitimizes you.
2. Tell true stories. Did you meet with a prospect yesterday? It’s much more compelling to open your conversation about something real that happened instead of words on a page. Your website looks like every other AI consulting website. No shade, mine does too. Website is unlikely to be a major source of business. Don’t lie to yourself that adding features to your site is investing in your business growth until you are getting new leads from it.
3. The question you should be asking is how do I get my 2nd, 3rd and 4th clients because otherwise you have just traded being an employee with benefits for ‘freedom’ and utter dependence on your single client. Again, embrace all the strategies. My 2nd client came from responding to an RFP - something I’d never done in my career. 3rd client came from a referral from 2nd client. 4th client came from a friend who knew I did tech and need some help to bring a project to life. None of it makes sense in hindsight, but the point is that you learn by doing. Every client teaches you something about the type of business you want to become.
Bonus tip: read books. Not because they have the formula that you will use, but because they have the best ideas written down. Some combination of those ideas is likely your path to success. Reading books has far greater return than shorter forms (social media and dare I say HN comments). Bizarrely, the most impactful book I read is one called The Prosperous Coach which is about an entirely different business system than anything I do.
I was in an interview process with a company for an architect position. I was very up front that I was more suited for CTO positions which they didn’t have open and I’d only be willing to work a few hours/week as I started my own business. They wanted that role full-time but mentioned an RFP would be coming out soon from their leadership team.
I don’t generally think RFPs are a good fit (we’ve filed out a few since and haven’t seen much response). If you can get RFP with a relationship then you might have a chance.
There’s lots of aggregators (sam.gov for example) but I’d recommend your local jurisdictions (city, county, state) - check their websites and see if any proposals fit your style. Often, locals get preferential consideration.
By having a reasonably successful open source project while in university. Someone reached out with work in a relevant area. I suppose that gate is mostly shut off these days with the volume of vibe-coded crap (or even non-crap) and uptick of clearly fraudulent stars on GitHub.
I guess you could say that I got lucky. I answered an ad in the newspaper. Yes, like a physical newspaper. Yes, I'm old. Get off my lawn.
From there, I found a few clients through that one original client, and later in my career they came from colleagues I'd worked with when during periods when I had a "real" job.
I am still in the phase of: Just released it, and fighting hard to make it working.
But mainly, a lot of things accumulated. I am 40 now, with two kids, the second - 6 months old. When she is 20, I will probably need to use daipers for elderly people. And she needs proper education.
AI is changing the world, and being a software developer might not be a safe long-term position anymore.
With my, almost 20 years of professional experience, as a software developer contractor, seeing a lot of project, I just felt confident enough to try. Let's see how it will go :)
I know. Just kidding with the daipers ;). I am conerned, at that age, working like I do it now won't be really possible, and that really might affect our monthly income and etc.
You have to ask yourself - why? I’ve worked full time for consulting departments/companies (not staff aug) where I have been over projects for 6 years.
I get paid whether I’m on vacation, on the bench, full benefits, etc.
They take care of finding projects, chasing down payments, sales, marketing and I get paid…decently.
Every time I think about going independent - and I have a decent network and great credentials for my specialty - the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze. I get to focus on leading projects and not have to worry about the surrounding work.
Not really a consultancy story, as we were an aspiring start-up. We had created a homepage and a LinkedIn page for our company, we wrote a business plan and talked to VCs and business angels and other start-ups to learn and raise funds - completely in vain for a year.
Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.
It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.
I am still a student; But the thing that got me actual responses from people in the industry was shipping hardware that physically works. Posted a NoC running on an Artix-7 with UART latency readback and got more engagement in a week than anything else I'd done. People in this space can smell checkbox projects immediately.
Had been consulting for equity with one startup out of an accelerator, so it was natural to go paid once I went out on my own. For the next few clients, approached investors I knew from that and other startups, who referred me to portfolio companies who needed me. I wish I'd read Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting at the beginning though, I would have avoided many mistakes (like day-rate billing).
Most enterprises that need consultants are using Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Dynamics, etc. If a company has an engineering department to build and run internal software, they very rarely need a consultant. And if they don't, they are very unlikely to higher a consultant to build it custom. They'd want "out of the box" because they think (often incorrectly these days), it will be easier to maintain.
This was a long time ago but I got an article published in Byte Magazine back when Byte mattered. Got a phone call a couple of weeks after it was published.
Absolutely easiest way is to find some consultant work sales agency that takes a commission when they manage to sell you somewhere. At least where I live there are multiple options, just list yourself (or your company) there.
Also you don't have to do the sales work yourself and they find suitable customers for you etc, it's totally worth the price especially if you are just starting
Hello. I am also doing this and have more leads / opportunities/ projects than I can handle at the moment. All from my network.
Happy to collaborate / share. Please leave links to your cool projects / GitHub / portfolio etc and I'll reach out if it feels like a possible match.
Thank you and best of luck.
I've been in the bad habit of not publicly publishing a lot of my more interesting projects from the last few years, but I also consult and would love to talk shop. Happy to share code and projects over email. Even if your current workload is outside my wheelhouse, it would be good to make a connection. Email in bio.
1. SEO and Linkedin https://www.amazingcto.com - best was connecting Google Search Console via MCP to Claude Code CLI for optimizations of landing pages.
2. Semrush has a free tier that works for me for SEO.
3. GEO (AI optimizations), AIs return me when people ask about "CTO Coach"
My first project came from an ex-colleague's friend. Another approach was cold emailing existing data and analytics agencies (my domain is data engineering) with my portfolio. Helps to keep a capability deck handy.
As a consultant I got my first project through a former colleague who referred me to the organization looking for a consultant.
It's not easy to find consultations out of the blue, I have gotten one by apply to a public call looking for a consultant that I am in the being interviewed process now, but referrals are far more easier.
Is anyone in this space nervous that companies will spend their infrastructure or software engineering budget on AI 'agents' like Claude en lieu of consulting dollars?
If you aren't afraid of this, are you doing anything different from a marketing or even daily work perspective?
I used to help for free in a forum of an open source booking engine, a British startup wanted to migrate into this software and heavily customize it for their own needs, they hired me and ended up working for them for 6 years
Can you publish a very short and concise case study of how you've helped one of your clients? Would that client be down to reference you to their friends? If not, can you go the extra mile with them so they just gush about you to others?
Rely on your network. This idea you’re going to email someone you never met and they’re going to agree to wire you 10k is as fanciful as it sounds.
As others have mentioned, it’s a super crowded space and based on my experience and metrics, in the last year has become 4-5x more crowded.
Your offer of 10 free hours sounds great and if you’ve read Alex hormozis books you’re thinking you’re on the right path. 10 hours isn’t free though. It’s 10 hours of my time to support someone who probably has no idea what they’re doing (business wise, I’m sure technically you have skill but that’s not enough.)
Once you’ve got some case studies from people you know. Figure out where the money is and where it’s going. Then give it away for free as lead magnets with value. Charge to do hands on implementation and get your foot in the door there. Make it blatantly obvious you have skills wider than just implementing your lead magnet and look for legitimate opportunities to help their business.
Once you’re at this stage, you can start emailing warm leads.
You need to be likeable, extremely reliable, technical, up to date and be able to deliver value to clients that can afford you.
Lastly, this is an incredibly difficult space to be in. If you don’t have a network that you can rely on to generate leads, you’re sunk. Change tact and focus on the job market.
The good thing is, you probably do have a network, you’ve just never thought of them like that before.
Open source helped me more than cold outreach. Shipping something small and useful gave potential clients something concrete to evaluate instead of just a resume. The conversations that followed were much warmer.
4 years as a sub contractor for two different fortune companies (Bank and ARM)
Then head hunted from LinkedIn. Six months so far of my own gig working for a VisualFX company. Linux migration and it's tight. Everything's a mess, so I'm just riding this until.
I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.
Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.
Still working with them 6 years later.
I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!
Be nice on the internet, I guess.
Your story is a nice succinct version of the "Business of Authority" strategy. Establish yourself as an expert, work finds you.
https://thebusinessofauthority.com/
I never thought about these as different acquisition models. What others are there to learn about?
The last time I mentioned this I got downvoted into a crater, so maybe ppl hate it (I'm open to hearing counterpoints!) but there's an army of tech freelancers swapping advice in a slack called "Rands Leadership Slack". My old boss suggested it. I thought it was BS. It was surprisingly informative - case in point it's where I first heard of the above podcast.
I suspect part of it is also just visibility. You can't be hired, if people don't know about you. Being active in a community gives pretty large visibility surface area, while still being able to provide genuine value & build relationships.
yes, i believe that's very true. the challenge now is for me to figure out what the best places are to be visible on.
programming language forums are good when they are growing and there is more demand than can be satisfied. i was in a group like that and it worked well for a while.
i think potentially small business forums should be good. a least when i want to target small businesses.
any recommendations or other suggestions?
> any recommendations or other suggestions? Sure, but not any you should really deeply pay attention to :)
Targeting small businesses can be good and fun, for a variety of reasons. It's just... small business mean everything from rivet manufacturers to real estate agents. The more generalised you are, the less you can set yourself apart.
The more focused you are, the more you begin to understand your market / audience - what matters to them, common problems, financial cycles, the overall network etc - the better you can serve them (including making actual products for them). This creates a positive feedback loop... over a long period of time. Years, probably (at least it was for me. I started from scratch in the web dev space, it's taken about 4 years to get to a 'good' financial position with nice clients).
I've begun specialising in web-tech-for-hardware (so not embedded, but web tech focused around accessing, commissioning, controlling embedded devices by non-engineers), and providing the supporting software for those (web apps with serial support, manufacturing test systems, in-field mobile apps to access & setup devices when there's no internet). It's niche, but I thought it was a good field because I also like UI/UX design, and I felt it's something embedded engineers aren't great at.
I originally started my career in the embedded space (before taking a detour into the business world), so I guess it gave me enough of a leg up to understand just enough parlance to talk shop. Not enough to really build anything, but to know what UART or I2C are, to know to poke fun at PLCs, the difficulty with soldering LGA/BGAs, why performance and low power matter, etc etc. This builds trust... but that's a by-product. I genuinely enjoy the space and like the people, so I guess that comes across too.
Maybe instead of focusing on a technical field, if you're interested in helping small businesses, see if they have any industry groups or bodies you can join + conferences you can attend. Be the guy in the room that has the skills they don't have. There might be lots of more competent engineers out there (certainly true for me), but in my case I'm the only guy I know that's willing to be in _this_ particular space.
I've seen variants of this a few times. Being publicly helpful is a good way to get business. Need a lawyer to help with a specific case? You'll probably hire the person who's active in your community, or who wrote a helpful blog post about it.
General consultancy is an extremely crowded space. As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
My advice would be to differentiate yourself:
- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.
- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.
- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you
> Become an expert in 1 thing
I endorse this. I've been doing generalist consulting for about six years, and I love flying solo. I've been successful in landing some big customers and interesting projects, but I'm tired of the inefficiency that comes with being a generalist, so I've decided to specialize vertically.
I had a super-interesting project in executive search in the last couple years, and I've decided to settle around that area: executive search and recruitment firms. Maybe later, as an extension I'll target other B2B, relationship-driven professional service firms tha share a common core of processes.
I've only recently pivoted but I'm already starting to see the fruits. It's commercially efficient. Many potential customers seem happy to open the door and chat. I know where to find them, online and off. And then it's operationally efficient. I'm confident I could jump on a customer project and recognize most of their processes and systems immediately and have a quick impact. I already have a base of IP (documented business procedures, code, etc.) and only intend to grow it in the coming years and even turn it into a "productized service".
I think people refuse to specialize for three main reasons. The first is for lack of a clear thesis. That's fine, you need to explore for a bit. The second is for a fear of lack of opportunities, which is often unfounded. The third is due to psychological reasons related to the image of self. On this last one I can only advise that (a) even in specialization there is way more variety than you think, (b) you can always keep growing as a generalist with side projects and self-directed learning and (c) nothing is ever fixed in stone, everything is in flow - you can always pivot out into other interesting directions.
I used to fear specialization because of a form of commercial or career FOMO. The reality is you instead get spread to thin and are (ironically?) now at risk of being displaced by "good enough" AI solutions. If you are a generalist you still need to be "T-shaped" with a few areas of deeper expertise. Funny enough your expertise could be getting things done-done using all your generalist abilities (ex: able to take initial ideas all the way to a active, viable business).
How? This is what I never understood. Every domain expert I’ve ever knowing is because they’ve already I can spend all the time I have reading and toying around in a subject, but until I have real concrete experience to guide me, it’s usually pretty difficult to become an “expert” in anything. I know how to become an advanced hobbyist, but thats never in my life translated to someone being willing to pay me over say, and already established expert
I've drifted across projects in different industries (FMCG, investment funds, ad agencies, startups of various sorts) and like I said I had a long project (over two years) for an executive search firm and got to see the ins and outs of how everything works from strategy to technology. I could be drifting to find clients in yet another vertical but I've decided to stay put for at least a few years. So to answer your question, in my particular case: I drifted, stumbled upon something by chance, and then took a conscious decision to stay.
If you're a dev, one approach to specialization is to align with the tooling associated with common "profit center" processes. Become a Salesforce/Hubspot/Odoo/Shopify developer. If you're not interested in developing, you can specialize in learning one specific ecosystem really well and then teach companies -- typically SMBs -- how to set themselves up and organize their operations around it.
This seems all good and well 10 years ago, but how well does this survive when the actual SMEs can just use LLMs to achieve the same effect? Those are the sort of platforms going all in on that stuff.
This can help and hurt. E.g. if you run a very successful Shopify plugin, you risk Shopify implementing it natively and wiping you out in one fell swoop.
common "profit center" processes
how do i find what those are?
i see the point, but i don't find developing for one specific tool very appealing.
how?
From GP comment: “either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one.”
"Executive search and recruitment firms" is an industry/segment, though, right? I thought this comment was more about specializing in some particular niche tech thing wrt the "just start a open source project guysss" comment
Specialization works by vertical or by function. Or you can actually mix them if your TAM remains large enough.
Yes, the parent was referring to technical specialization. But my point is either works. Especially in the context of what OP is trying to do which is "automation" - technically very broad.
+1 about overseas freelancers. And US customer to European freelancer is not the arb it used to be. The California SaaS sector has collapsed in the wake of venture capital rotating into AI-native, saas budgets (salaries) are down, the dollar is down, and remote European salaries are up. Zoom latency across 7-8h timezone difference is workable, the current arb is to hire from further and further east. Unless there is a war disruption such as an attack on the trans Atlantic internet pipes.
Are you using 'arb' to mean something like cheat or trick, or cost-saving technique?
Arbitrage I assume
I know, I just don't see the arbitrage in what's described? If I order online because it's cheaper than the high street, that's not an arbitrage – the arbitrage would include then selling it on the high street afterwards, getting paid to close the gap until it reflects only delivery fees and the value of immediacy.
I assumed from the context the arb was California salary vs their local salary.
And to make that an arbitrage you'd need to subcontract someone local to do the job you've taken the California pay for. It doesn't mean 'get a better deal in a non-obvious way/place', it's taking both sides of the trade in different markets.
they might hire them to work on the project and then sell the project themselves hence the arb, or outsourcing basically.
Good point about the project lifecycle. In my experience, open source contributions often get repurposed this way. The key is clear licensing from the start.
>>I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
One place hired me thinking I could fix some software they farmed out to India. I was not aware of that when they hired me. Afterwards they said they wanted it fixed in two weeks and fired me when I told them it wasn't possible. The software was in a language I'd never used on hardware I never programmed for.
They hired someone locally who was something of an expert in the area who claimed he could fix it in a month. It took him six months to fix the problems.
Lesson of hiring cheap overseas.
And a lesson in the psychology of sunk costs.
They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.
Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.
Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.
> As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.
This is why cold outreach is rarely effective. Until you’ve seen it, you don’t realize the volume of incoming freelancing pitches coming from all of the freelancers. It’s getting worse with AI automation, now.
Any real networking at all will set you apart. It has to be more than sending someone a LinkedIn request because that’s what all of the other agencies are doing too. You have to establish yourself as a real and trusted person.
Re cold outreach: it depends. The bar is abysmally low, and most outreach is just an untargeted spam cannon. Don't be like those people.
If you manage to make the outreach warmer, it can work surprisingly well. I built a tool to identify high-intent leads on LinkedIn which gets me acceptance rates of 60%+ by finding people that comment on relevant content to my niche: https://www.getibex.com
+3 for focus / personal and networking.
I don't consult anymore, but for an extended period I did so at a premium rate and as an independent. I remember a hiring manager's boss saying something to me like "I could get 2 or more consultants for the same money" and I replied, " I don't really see myself as competing with those organizations, but if you can get the job done it makes sense to take that path." It was both cocky and true (not sure today-me would say that). The thing I understood well was that differentiating as a skilled individual makes you much harder to displace; there are countless "$TECH programmer with N years of experience in $FOOBAR" while there are very few "$YOU".
2 and 3 are great but 1 will not work great if you're a consultant, unless the 1 thing is broad enough to have actual demand that you can tap into. Finding that 1 thing is also extremely challenging, esp. if you're trying to make it the main revenue play. I can be the world's leading expert on Brainfuck, but that doesn't mean I'll get my bills paid. It's much better to be the "I can call this guy to figure out whatever I need to figure out" person than "this guy only does X well, I'm not sure if i need that, might have to hire the general guy to figure this out first" guy.
> Become an expert in 1 thing,
Or one vertical, or space. IE: you act as a CTO for companies that are in manufacturing but are a liiitle to small to hire someone.
> Become an expert in 1 thing
Any suggestions to what that could be?
I'm a backend developer looking to specialize in something with a clear demand.
Top-of-the-head ideas are things like: Kubernetes, Postgres, Caddy, Self-hosting, Go or Google Cloud
Obviously, one has to try to gauge the demand before spending too much time on it
My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.
I'm a web developer / designer-lite (amongst other things in previous lives), and have embedded myself as the web-tech guy for an embedded / hardware team. I help provide better customer facing interfaces (through websites, apps, etc) to both end users and manufacturer that the company uses.
I've made small, simple tools that can be packaged up along in a device's flash (it's ~2KB), that allows a user to interrogate the device via serial, capture all the commands + responses, & trivially email them to an engineer. It's designed for troubleshooting devices remote, without needing to ship JLink's or debuggers or what not to clients. It's a very small thing, but it's cool to hear people using it to help troubleshoot with users, in a way that's much simpler than trying to jump on the phone with them & guess what they're seeing on their screen.
I also specifically help make manufacturing test systems which sit closer to a web-app like experience (in terms of usability and visuals), because I've observed that providing end-of-line manufacturing staff with poorly cludged together test systems leads to a bunch of errors which don't need to exist (they're often just quickly thrown together CLIs, which are unpleasant to use and buggy all round - especially for less tech savvy manufacturing staff).
I also happen to really like embedded engineers, they're fun to hang around with - and I get genuine satisfaction out of being able to help them out in areas they haven't specialised in.
> My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.
Yeah, I think that is good advice. You just need "an in", somewhere to start.
Sadly, all of this stuff is a commodity. The market is flooded with such "experts." I'm not saying you aren't better than all of them, you may very well be, it is just very hard to differentiate.
I think you're right that it would be hard to differentiate.
I don't think there are many actual experts though, experts as in the people your developers call when they can't figure it out themselves. But the marked is probably small-ish, and there's a large effort to become a real expert.
Absolutely none of those are “specialties” that will set you apart
Becoming an expert in one thing also narrows down the potential suitable work tremendously. Also these days nobody wants to pay the expert prices since.. Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)
Sibling commenters seem to be confused.
Usually experts are T shaped. Acquiring expertise always means the time spent is away from learning something else.
The deeper and greater the expertise the more niche the topic usually becomes and the less demand there is.
The world might need X million web developers but how many experts are there in browser technology. Or even experts in that domain something more niche like rendering or rendering niche like Angle and WebGL..you already go this deep and it boils down to a handful of individuals.
Also I didn't say that there would not be demand just that many businesses are not willing to pay for it anymore. Industry layoffs, AI are huge leverages that any potential employer can use to have all the advantage when negotiating compensation.
The T shape is important - but the base of the T doesn't have to be in tech. If you're an expert in a particular niche and a generalist in a particular business you'll find work.
E.g., a web developer who knows a lot about how lawyers run their business.
Even if it's true that AI can replace an expert, and I really don't think it is, except in the simplest minds, the AI training companies are aggressively hiring experts...
Cogent point, expertly applied, thank you.
> Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)
Opus is far better at most surface-level tasks than it is at tasks that require deep knowledge and understanding of domains; someone who is a complete generalist (who thus has only surface level knowledge in many, many things) is far more replaceable with LLMs than someone who has deep knowledge in one.
Consider the way LLMs actually are created; they are not created from billions of repos with deep knowledge behind them. The majority of their knowledge comes from a massive amount of surface-level work that's been done and can be sampled from: React starter templates, starter templates + what little customization someone needed, blog-tutorial-level stuff.
This is a strong assertion that's directionally wrong. No matter the economy's state or any AI progress, experts are always searched for.
This is not true at all. Not even a sliver of truth.
There must be a word for this style of post where you take your own inadequacies and fears and project them on to others?
Not OP but I feel compelled to reply.
It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth. This (obviously?) implies the risk of targeting a narrower market, and the upside of being more attractive to that smaller population. It's a typical "quality over quantity" tradeoff.
To say there's no "sliver of truth" in pointing that out (let alone w/ an unwarranted jab about projecting fears) is... strange and maybe hypocritical. TLDR your response came across as emotional and passive-aggressive, and confusing.
> It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth
I do not necessarily agree with this as stated. A specialist will have access to many roles within their speciality that are not open to a generalist. The market for generalists without deep expertise is also extremely crowded.
How? I had a set of letterhead/envelopes/business cards printed up. I had already been "hanging-out" in the local electronics surplus stores, where they also sold used computer parts and the like. Stacked around the cash registers in these stores at that time were business cards. Various specialists. So I kept my own maintained stack of cards in my two main goto-stores, and I was friends with the register clerks, and had them handing out my cards on occasions when somebody came in the store and wanted help with "something". After 8 months of doing this, and being flat-broke, the day before Christmas, somebody telephoned off of my business card, and asked if I could do something. He brought some sample stuff, and I accepted a $200-per week retainer from him (I was really good at budgeting and that was what I had been getting for UEI until it ended). He had brought his checkbook with him, and wrote me a check. That started my personal word-of-mouth network and kept me going for a few decades.
Been at this 10 years. My top tip is if you’re doing cold outreach, kickstart the value exchange by giving something first without asking for anything in return.
A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.
It doesn’t need to be a big give - an actionable plan for a small system improvement they can give to someone internal to implement, for example, is fine.
Another tip is to highlight the problem with a loom video/recording of some sort. That way they’ve seen and heard you too. This builds instant trust and a feeling of knowing the person behind the business straight away.
Good luck!
> A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.
Can you give a more specific example from your recent experience?
(My point is: this sounds like very plausible sounding advice, until you try to apply this to a producer of steel ball bearings located in Upper Austria, just outside of Linz)
My approach is to break the project into small milestones — especially in the beginning — and align the incentives.
Put bluntly, I design it so I can't lose, and neither can my client. I design it so even in an adversarial, zero trust environment, the relationship and arrangement still makes sense.
In practice this looks like, I do a bit of work up front, ship a demo within the first week, if they're happy, they pay, it becomes theirs, and we continue working together.
I also choose projects I actually like, and that align with my goals, so even if I get hosed, I had fun and learned cool things. (But keeping milestones small minimizes the cost of getting hosed, for both parties :)
I do freelance consulting alongside building my own product.
My first clients came through a friend who connected me with people that needed someone to maintain a mobile app and its backoffice. Thats it. No cold outreach, no fancy strategy, just someone who knew what I could do and made the intro. I think most engineers underestimate how much work comes from just telling people around you what you do.
For getting more visibility I started writing about what I'm building on LinkedIn, sharing technical decisions, things I got wrong. People reach out from that. Not a flood but enough
One thing I'd warn about: consulting can eat your whole schedule if you let it. I had to put hard boundaries around my consulting hours because my own product was getting zero attention. Now I treat consulting as the thing that pays the bills while I build the thing I actually care about. If you dont set that boundary early you wake up in 2 years running a consultancy you never wanted.
My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.
Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.
On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.
As someone who went to work for a commercial software consultancy company early in my career, I am looking to follow in your footsteps. In consultancy, projects are over for me when my work is done. Rarely do I get to see the results. I want to work at a product company next.
It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).
Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.
so effectively you already had an audience? how long did you write the blog? how did you popularize it?
My history is all pretty public on the blog, but tl;dr write every day, don't be a coward re: topic, and work hard at writing well. It's easier than ever to meet cool people in tech through writing since almost everyone is spamming nonsense on AI.
I'm doing this right now -- AI automation for small businesses, started on Upwork about two months ago. The thing that actually moved the needle was writing proposals that were basically free mini consultations. Someone posts about needing their spreadsheet workflow automated, I'd write back describing their exact problem back to them and how I'd wire it up with n8n, what the timeline looks like, what usually goes wrong. No "I have 10 years of experience" stuff.
Took about 6 weeks to get 5 reviews. Before that I was competing on rate against people charging $15/hr and it was miserable. After the reviews landed I bumped from $70 to $95 and nobody pushed back. The reviews changed the entire dynamic of the conversation.
Upwork is such a miserable platform. Have you diversified to other sources?
Curious of what kind of workflows you end up working with and setting up? I am trying to figure out what I can automate in my work but I don't know if I have much.
Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.
Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.
Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.
Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)
I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.
This 100%. Just to give another viewpoint on this, having just started going full time on my solo agency, I actually love doing the sales and marketing stuff and scoping the work for clients. Yes, it does take a lot of time away from pure technical work but I do enjoy the balance of it. So, it does depend on your own interests and how you like to spend your time. Freelancing/Consulting is definitely not for everyone. And tbh, lets see maybe in a year or two I will be fed up of the sales/marketing stuff too.
One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.
I think this is under appreciated. I also had my stint (some years) of freelance and found that my general take home pay was too low.
That said. When staying in a job skill atrophy is a very real thing.
As nassim talen would say, it is less risky to be a contractor.
The gist is to mine your network, and the best is when you can have contacts as champions in your clients’ companies. Here are a few good readings;
- [20 Lessons for Attracting, Signing, and Retaining Great Clients](https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/service-business)([archive](https://archive.is/B0bWG))
- [How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor](https://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant/) ([archive](https://archive.is/iun16))
- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...) ([archive](https://archive.is/STvcv))
- [The Strategic Independent](https://tomcritchlow.com/strategy/) ([archive](https://archive.is/O5OKC))
- [A retiring consultant’s advice on consultants](https://www.economist.com/business/2023/08/17/a-retiring-con...) ([archive](https://archive.is/Slqwj))
- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients)([archive](https://archive.ph/kBPDL))
Amazing list of resources, thank you
I did similar stuff for many years (and sometimes still do). By far the most effective was going and meeting people in adjacent or similar fields and making sure they knew about me.
My favourite was helping scientists - not the highest paying gigs, but the most interesting work and sometimes it led to great ongoing relationships as their go to tech person.
I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting, and after that, they go into paid discovery at a lower rate than your full rate, out of which they get a technical persons documentation of the problem to solve. This approach definitely worked the best for me in the long run.
>I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting,
that is still a freebie, though, by definition. if you offer anything for free, it is a freebie.
and, offering a freebie does not necessarily signal desperation. i am not saying that one should not offer freebies, or even that one should. it all depends. and many variations are possible.
For example, escrow, via a services marketplace.
I worked on an open source application, and some people wanted to use parts of it as a library in their commercial applications. So I started a consultancy due to that demand. I still had a regular job at the same time though, so there was never a need to gather enough clients to make a living out of the consultancy job.
Things I learned:
- Get an accountant ASAP, even if the income is small. Just the peace of mind that my taxes were being filed correctly was worth the cost.
- You don't need a perfect solution from the start, you are working with your client towards something they can use.
- You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.
- Almost all clients wanted me to either come work for them or sell all (rights of) my work to them. This is understandable from their side, but if you want to stay independent you need to set some boundaries.
>You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.
you have to tell them that they have to communicate regularly too. otherwise, how can business be done. how can issues be sorted out. they will blame you for the issues later, although they did not discuss them with you. aka cya syndrome.
if they continue not to do it, you should fire them. or use reverse signoff protocol.
"we mutually agreed at the start of this engagement, that if you don't sign off on acceptance of a given deliverable within x days, it is understood that you have accepted it and will pay for it".
If it happens more than once, leave them. it indicates they don't take you seriously.
all such terms should be put in the contract, initially.
if they don't agree to such mutually protective terms, don't sign the contract at all.
Negotiate a kill fee for the contract too.
Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt (and the scars), for many of the above points.
The kill fee idea, I got from this video:
"fuck you, pay me" by mike monteiro
https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U
I get basically all my contract work through folks I've worked with in the past. With a little luck, your network slowly diffuses across the industry, and when they need a heavy-hitter, they know who to call
I started freelancing over 10 years ago, and I got my first freelance project through an acquaintance from my former dorm in Copenhagen. After that I got several different freelance jobs through recruiters on LinkedIn. But it was a different time, as the cliché goes. One thing to know about highly paid freelance positions is that they are extremely cyclical. These are positions that mainly exist because the market is booming and screaming for labor, and when that's not the case, companies will much, much prefer to have permanent employees.
In the time before COVID and up until its end, the tech market was booming, but when the economic stimulus ended and interest rates rose, the tech market shrank and the freelance market in Berlin/Germany (and probably Denmark too) has never really recovered. The positions simply aren't there, only very few that many fight over. The great thing about being a freelancer before was that you were almost treated like a rock star, recruiters contacted you all the time, and you could pick and choose.
If you don't have a large network, you can try signing up with different recruiters and see what they have to offer. You might be lucky if you live in regions with less competition and where clients are looking for someone local to work on-site. Getting hired these days also requires that you have (substantial) experience and can show some projects.
(By the way, I’m looking for a permanent position—preferably in Copenhagen—as the bank requires this to approve my loan application. Here is my resume just in case: https://lasse.sometechblog.com/)
What worked for me was getting the identity before the proof. I did work shaped like consulting before I called it consulting. Weekend hours for a friend's startup, teardowns of companies I liked, one-page analyses published publicly. None of it paid anything. All of it left a trail of specific outputs.
The friction on the first paid project wasn't finding the client. It was eliminating the need for them to take a risk on me, because they could see I'd been producing at that caliber for a year. The market caught up to the identity, not the other way around.
teardowns of companies I liked
how do you do that? how do you get the details about the company for that? i look at company websites, i usually only find marketing stuff but not really anything useful to tell me what's inside.
i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.
Referrals from the first 2-3 clients were everything. But to get those first clients — LinkedIn outreach with a very specific message about their problem worked better than anything else. Generic 'I am available for work' messages got ignored completely.
how do you find out about the problems though? i haven't come across anything like that on linkedin. and if it is not there, then i wouldn't even know where else to look. their website? their blog? people/companies generally don't write about their problems. even in job descriptions here usually isn't anything about the problems they want to solve.
If you'd like visibility, I pay experienced developers a small fee to write educational articles on software infrastructure. While you cannot write about your own projects, your byline in the article is a good place to say that you're looking for work (employment or contract).
https://theconsensus.dev/contribute.html
I'm close to finishing a fairly complex and laborious Elixir bridge to SQLite (through Rust) and I loved the journey. Maybe I should contact you and write an article. Hmm.
I hangout on a few Slack groups (Elixir, Ruby, etc), got quite a few projects this way as the founders were looking for experienced consultants.
It also helps if you could show either/both:
* a portfolio / clients you've worked with
* open source / "street-cred"
When I was looking for projects I always attach my Github profile (https://github.com/fredwu) to show my open source contributions, and also the SaaS products I've built myself (https://wuit.com/), and if clients are looking for C-level / strategic-level help, I also attach my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/), these help build up your reputation and stand out amongst many freelancers also looking for projects.
I just had a very quick glance at your site - there seems to be a lot of text, mostly focused on what you can offer. But what's missing is... who are you? What have you done?
This is solid advice. I'd add that community presence matters more than you might think—but it has to be genuine. Hanging out in Slack groups and actually helping people (without immediately pitching) builds real relationships. When you do mention you're consulting, people already know your work quality.
The portfolio/OSS combo is key because it removes risk. Clients can see what you actually ship, not just what you claim. Even small open source contributions help more than you'd expect.
One thing missing: referrals. Your first few clients are the hardest. But if you do good work, they'll refer others. That becomes your growth engine pretty quickly, so don't treat early clients as one-offs.
I was a Java programmer and administered a fairly big community website written in Drupal as a side gig, then applied to a news company that used Drupal, out of curiosity.
Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.
Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.
Identify who your buyer is. It’s probably not a technical person (and thus HN isn’t a great place to advertise).
Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)
For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.
Just my $0.02 of course, circumstances may vary
So unlike some folks, I’m still very much reliant on $DAYJOB for the majority of my income. But I managed to carve out a niche in an unexpected place.
OS/2 consulting
It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.
I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.
The nice thing about a niche like this is that once they use you for fixing an old OS/2 box, you're on the list for other things, too.
I'd love to get some gigs in retro software development for OS/2, MS-DOS, Motif/CDE, etc...
First: Flew to California on whim after meeting some other devs in an IRC chat. Second: I kid you not, playing pool in a bar.
I work at a small consulting firm that focuses on business software. My best consultants are not programmers by trade. Some worked up from help desk to IT Manager or CTO, some were accountants and learned enough about ERP imports they took a leap. A good way to do this is to work at a consulting firm. You will learn within a few years how to deal with dozens to hundreds of clients, how to keep an organized client file, manage quoting, billing or delivery of projects from end to end. How do deal with upset customers, how to close a sales call, you will do it all and you will be constantly learning. You will implement a client at one company that works and call up another company and pitch them the same idea, software or tool (I have clients doing AI.....) or whatever it is.
You will become tool agnostic. you will see to the end. you will find tools to do it.
So a good way to go independent is to go into a consultancy based business - you will get a feel for AR, AP, contracts and so forth in a way that you won't really often see at a service provider, ISP, software company or SaaS tech company.
The best is proof of work. If you don't have any, build something and show that off. Even listing out the companies you have worked for will be good. Cold email could work if its not completely "cold", i.e, find companies/people who are in the space/industry where you have worked so that they can see you have solved a similar problem before. 10+ years of software engineering is quite valuable, you just have to present yourself in a way where the value can be seen.
Also, never, ever work for free. One, your time is worth more than you think. Second, it makes you sound a bit less serious and less valuable and you will attract clients that are not fun to work with. Not worth your time at all. The only people who MAYBE should be working for free are students who are in high school.
I have been freelancing on and off on the side for the past 8 years and this year pulled the plug and going full time on it and tbh I am now oversubscribed. So, there's definitely a need for it.
My first few clients (8 years ago) were through posting on reddit (/r/forhire) and then also on the monthly HN freelancer thread (was shocked they stopped doing that, I have gotten 2 solid clients from those!).
I made monkeys.zip - a project that was completely useless and reflects my interests and skills, and people have reached out with creative projects since
In your case, bike or drive around and talk to SMEs in your city. Have friends refer you to their contacts, so it's a warm intro. Build software for free, and maintain it on an annual maintenance contract basis. "Value-price" each AMC. Initially, be fine with "leaving money on the table". Within two to three deals you will figure out a mutually profitable pricing strategy.
I have been a solo contractor for little over 15 years now. This was my goal all along and it did not happen overnight. My path was more organic, I was a W2 for quite some time and in that time I had one personal focus - become more valuable to the company than they are to you. I took on tasks everyone was running away from, I changed code which was preceded by comments like “// DO NOT TOUCH THIS OR COMPANY WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS” and after so time every big thing that was needed or every customer fire/emergency needed me. I was even called into an emergency meeting on my honeymoom :)
once I was comfortable I am fairly indispensible part of the business I submitted my resignation along with an offer to continue working as an independent contractor which was swiftly accepted. once I got this first (and as steady as it gets) thing everything went much smoother after this, word of mouth mostly and I went to a lot of meetups (especially pre covid) from where I got a number of contracts too
*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.
People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.
I've been a team lead in software delivery for 15+ years at an agency. The "solo project" path started differently for me: I built an internal tool because the existing options didn't solve my problem. Measuring flow metrics from Jira turned out to be something other teams wanted too. What helped: solving my own problem first, open sourcing it, and writing about the domain (flow metrics, delivery performance) rather than the tool itself.
I tried this 5 years ago, haven't had a customer yet.
3 quick (and true) stories that helped me when I was in a similar situation (started my own thing in 2024). Currently have 6 clients and 9 employees (which wasn’t the plan!)
1. Embrace the bizarre. You need your first client, not a repeatable go to market motion. Once you have a client, you can begin to work on getting clients and figuring out what type of work you want to do longer-term. My first client was a friend who owned a business, knew enough about technology to scratch the surface and was willing to pay $5k for me to coach him. He had to write all the code and I agreed to monthly coaching until he was able to get his site in production. Terrible economics but earned real money and that’s the point of your first client - it legitimizes you. 2. Tell true stories. Did you meet with a prospect yesterday? It’s much more compelling to open your conversation about something real that happened instead of words on a page. Your website looks like every other AI consulting website. No shade, mine does too. Website is unlikely to be a major source of business. Don’t lie to yourself that adding features to your site is investing in your business growth until you are getting new leads from it. 3. The question you should be asking is how do I get my 2nd, 3rd and 4th clients because otherwise you have just traded being an employee with benefits for ‘freedom’ and utter dependence on your single client. Again, embrace all the strategies. My 2nd client came from responding to an RFP - something I’d never done in my career. 3rd client came from a referral from 2nd client. 4th client came from a friend who knew I did tech and need some help to bring a project to life. None of it makes sense in hindsight, but the point is that you learn by doing. Every client teaches you something about the type of business you want to become.
Bonus tip: read books. Not because they have the formula that you will use, but because they have the best ideas written down. Some combination of those ideas is likely your path to success. Reading books has far greater return than shorter forms (social media and dare I say HN comments). Bizarrely, the most impactful book I read is one called The Prosperous Coach which is about an entirely different business system than anything I do.
This is great, and importantly actionable advice. Thank you for sharing specific ideas.
How did you get a RFP? Is there feeds that can be picked up ?
I was in an interview process with a company for an architect position. I was very up front that I was more suited for CTO positions which they didn’t have open and I’d only be willing to work a few hours/week as I started my own business. They wanted that role full-time but mentioned an RFP would be coming out soon from their leadership team.
I don’t generally think RFPs are a good fit (we’ve filed out a few since and haven’t seen much response). If you can get RFP with a relationship then you might have a chance.
There’s lots of aggregators (sam.gov for example) but I’d recommend your local jurisdictions (city, county, state) - check their websites and see if any proposals fit your style. Often, locals get preferential consideration.
By having a reasonably successful open source project while in university. Someone reached out with work in a relevant area. I suppose that gate is mostly shut off these days with the volume of vibe-coded crap (or even non-crap) and uptick of clearly fraudulent stars on GitHub.
I guess you could say that I got lucky. I answered an ad in the newspaper. Yes, like a physical newspaper. Yes, I'm old. Get off my lawn.
From there, I found a few clients through that one original client, and later in my career they came from colleagues I'd worked with when during periods when I had a "real" job.
I am still in the phase of: Just released it, and fighting hard to make it working.
But mainly, a lot of things accumulated. I am 40 now, with two kids, the second - 6 months old. When she is 20, I will probably need to use daipers for elderly people. And she needs proper education.
AI is changing the world, and being a software developer might not be a safe long-term position anymore.
With my, almost 20 years of professional experience, as a software developer contractor, seeing a lot of project, I just felt confident enough to try. Let's see how it will go :)
I will you all the best in your journey :)
> When she is 20, I will probably need to use daipers for elderly people.
60 really isn’t that old
I know. Just kidding with the daipers ;). I am conerned, at that age, working like I do it now won't be really possible, and that really might affect our monthly income and etc.
You have to ask yourself - why? I’ve worked full time for consulting departments/companies (not staff aug) where I have been over projects for 6 years.
I get paid whether I’m on vacation, on the bench, full benefits, etc.
They take care of finding projects, chasing down payments, sales, marketing and I get paid…decently.
Every time I think about going independent - and I have a decent network and great credentials for my specialty - the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze. I get to focus on leading projects and not have to worry about the surrounding work.
Not really a consultancy story, as we were an aspiring start-up. We had created a homepage and a LinkedIn page for our company, we wrote a business plan and talked to VCs and business angels and other start-ups to learn and raise funds - completely in vain for a year.
Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.
It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.
I am still a student; But the thing that got me actual responses from people in the industry was shipping hardware that physically works. Posted a NoC running on an Artix-7 with UART latency readback and got more engagement in a week than anything else I'd done. People in this space can smell checkbox projects immediately.
Had been consulting for equity with one startup out of an accelerator, so it was natural to go paid once I went out on my own. For the next few clients, approached investors I knew from that and other startups, who referred me to portfolio companies who needed me. I wish I'd read Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting at the beginning though, I would have avoided many mistakes (like day-rate billing).
Whats your actual tech experience?
Most enterprises that need consultants are using Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Dynamics, etc. If a company has an engineering department to build and run internal software, they very rarely need a consultant. And if they don't, they are very unlikely to higher a consultant to build it custom. They'd want "out of the box" because they think (often incorrectly these days), it will be easier to maintain.
This was a long time ago but I got an article published in Byte Magazine back when Byte mattered. Got a phone call a couple of weeks after it was published.
I met a bloke in the pub who was looking for a contractor, said I was a software engineer, kind of went from there.
But that was back in 2013, the market has completely changed and I don't even do consulting anymore
These days it's a buyers market, best of luck!
Recommendations from past workplaces and networking. Honestly never heard of anyone else being hired as a solo contributor outside those channels.
Absolutely easiest way is to find some consultant work sales agency that takes a commission when they manage to sell you somewhere. At least where I live there are multiple options, just list yourself (or your company) there.
Also you don't have to do the sales work yourself and they find suitable customers for you etc, it's totally worth the price especially if you are just starting
Hello. I am also doing this and have more leads / opportunities/ projects than I can handle at the moment. All from my network.
Happy to collaborate / share. Please leave links to your cool projects / GitHub / portfolio etc and I'll reach out if it feels like a possible match. Thank you and best of luck.
I've been in the bad habit of not publicly publishing a lot of my more interesting projects from the last few years, but I also consult and would love to talk shop. Happy to share code and projects over email. Even if your current workload is outside my wheelhouse, it would be good to make a connection. Email in bio.
1. SEO and Linkedin https://www.amazingcto.com - best was connecting Google Search Console via MCP to Claude Code CLI for optimizations of landing pages.
2. Semrush has a free tier that works for me for SEO.
3. GEO (AI optimizations), AIs return me when people ask about "CTO Coach"
I just asked Gemini and you did not come up.
My first project came from an ex-colleague's friend. Another approach was cold emailing existing data and analytics agencies (my domain is data engineering) with my portfolio. Helps to keep a capability deck handy.
As a consultant I got my first project through a former colleague who referred me to the organization looking for a consultant.
It's not easy to find consultations out of the blue, I have gotten one by apply to a public call looking for a consultant that I am in the being interviewed process now, but referrals are far more easier.
Basically, I reached out to existing relationships. A few had needs I could fill. A few referred me to others.
Is anyone in this space nervous that companies will spend their infrastructure or software engineering budget on AI 'agents' like Claude en lieu of consulting dollars?
If you aren't afraid of this, are you doing anything different from a marketing or even daily work perspective?
I used to help for free in a forum of an open source booking engine, a British startup wanted to migrate into this software and heavily customize it for their own needs, they hired me and ended up working for them for 6 years
Can you publish a very short and concise case study of how you've helped one of your clients? Would that client be down to reference you to their friends? If not, can you go the extra mile with them so they just gush about you to others?
Rely on your network. This idea you’re going to email someone you never met and they’re going to agree to wire you 10k is as fanciful as it sounds.
As others have mentioned, it’s a super crowded space and based on my experience and metrics, in the last year has become 4-5x more crowded.
Your offer of 10 free hours sounds great and if you’ve read Alex hormozis books you’re thinking you’re on the right path. 10 hours isn’t free though. It’s 10 hours of my time to support someone who probably has no idea what they’re doing (business wise, I’m sure technically you have skill but that’s not enough.)
Once you’ve got some case studies from people you know. Figure out where the money is and where it’s going. Then give it away for free as lead magnets with value. Charge to do hands on implementation and get your foot in the door there. Make it blatantly obvious you have skills wider than just implementing your lead magnet and look for legitimate opportunities to help their business.
Once you’re at this stage, you can start emailing warm leads.
You need to be likeable, extremely reliable, technical, up to date and be able to deliver value to clients that can afford you.
Lastly, this is an incredibly difficult space to be in. If you don’t have a network that you can rely on to generate leads, you’re sunk. Change tact and focus on the job market. The good thing is, you probably do have a network, you’ve just never thought of them like that before.
Open source helped me more than cold outreach. Shipping something small and useful gave potential clients something concrete to evaluate instead of just a resume. The conversations that followed were much warmer.
I got most of my clients from Reddit and Discord.
People look for freelancers, I say hello.
One guy asked for proof of prior work. I said, demo will be online Wednesday, there will be your proof. Hahaha
It works if you can work it.
By the grace of god
Well, I started a long time ago: I had written several books and readers occasionally contacted me for doing gig work.
Network, relationships, people you know.
Old employers have always been the mainstay of my consulting work, former colleagues my main leads.
Back in the day, being a teenager and hanging out on freelancing forums was enough.
I went to a conference and talked to all the vendors about their products.
10 years of normal work slop
4 years as a sub contractor for two different fortune companies (Bank and ARM)
Then head hunted from LinkedIn. Six months so far of my own gig working for a VisualFX company. Linux migration and it's tight. Everything's a mess, so I'm just riding this until.
Rework your website to say something real
Word of mouth / former employer
Gumption and a firm handshake!
Hi, I did the same for a while.
Offer to help them solve a few small problems, and then deliver.
Freelancing & someone simple email, nothing special
But what does that entail?