Ask HN: How do I start being a consultant?

Not really joking here.

- full time contract work for at least 6 months

- my LLC formed (US only, I think)

- my site built, setup w/analytics, a blog, Google webmaster tools, etc.

- my first set of business cards in hand (may not be that important to some people, but they came in handy for me)

- other misc. stuff (spoke to my CPA about taxes, researched sample contracts, looked into software I'd need, etc.)

Doing all that while still having income meant that I didn't have to trade billable time for those once I became a consultant. When you're running your own business, you'll always have to invest non-billable time, but those first 3/6/12 months are always the hardest, so do what you can to maximize billable hours and finding more clients or work, w/out overwhelming yourself.

If you pick your charity well, you'll get kudos from it, and exposure to useful decision makers. Many charities have boards made up of well-off or powerful decision makers in other places that are willing to spend money in their day-jobs, but like you are working pro-bono for the charity.

If you circulate with these people, and deliver a high-quality product, you get the benefit of exposure to the right sort of future customers, the benefit of kudos for pro-bono (in the face of people who are also pro-bono and so value your input as much as they value their own), and you don't have the problem of your product being undervalued, because it's for a charitable good, not a discount for someone who should actually be paying for it.

(2) Raise your rates.

(3) As you work for clients, keep a sharp eye for opportunities to build "specialty practices". If you get to work on a project involving Mongodb, spend some extra time and effort to get Mongodb under your belt. If you get a project for a law firm, spend some extra time thinking about how to develop applications that deal with contracts or boilerplates or PDF generation or document management.

(4) Raise your rates.

(5) Start refusing hourly-rate projects. Your new minimum billable increment is a day.

(6) Take end-to-end responsibility for the business objectives of whatever you build. This sounds fuzzy, like, "be able to talk in a board room", but it isn't! It's mechanically simple and you can do it immediately: Stop counting hours and days. Stop pushing back when your client changes scope. Your remedy for clients who abuse your flexibility with regards to scope is "stop working with that client". Some of your best clients will be abusive and you won't have that remedy. Oh well! Note: you are now a consultant.

(7) Hire one person at a reasonable salary. You are now responsible for their payroll and benefits. If you don't book enough work to pay both your take-home and their salary, you don't eat. In return: they don't get an automatic percentage of all the revenue of the company, nor does their salary automatically scale with your bill rate.

(8) You are now "senior" or "principal". Raise your rates.

(9) Generalize out from your specialties: Mongodb -> NoSQL -> highly scalable backends. Document management -> secure contract management.

(10) Raise your rates.

(11) You are now a top-tier consulting group compared to most of the market. Market yourself as such. Also: your rates are too low by probably about 40-60%.

Try to get it through your head: people who can simultaneously (a) crank out code (or arrange to have code cranked out) and (b) take responsibility for the business outcome of the problems that code is supposed to solve --- people who can speak both tech and biz --- are exceptionally rare. They shouldn't be; the language of business is mostly just elementary customer service, of the kind taught to entry level clerks at Nordstrom's. But they are, so if you can do that, raise your rates.