Ask HN: Finding Remote Enterprise SW Consulting Leads: Non-US Resident Edition

Well, one approach is to team up with a consultant/contractor in the US. Preferably someone you know personally that will not skim off too much. This reduces the risk for the clients, as they have a US party as the legal contractor, don't have to do international payments, etc.

Of course, usually that kind of business is started by the guy in the place with the clients. It doesn't have to be huge body shop, in fact the smaller, the better they have to treat you. My previous company used such a contractor (notionext.com). I don't know how easy it is to leverage yourself into having direct clients; probably quite hard.

A lot of other comments have touched on things well. My experience as a corporate is that I often find the 'US local' is a thin shell of sales/leadership, someone I feel I can hold accountable when I'm not getting results during the engagement, and the hands-on tactical folks on their team are typically globally dispersed. This has never been a hard sell for me internally to get approved. It's quite silly on our part because we end up paying $200/hr for resources that probably only see $30/hr of it; but finding a whole team of SME's in some Enterprise SW that are entirely US based can be quite difficult too.

All said, you need to setup a US based sales office. Even if it's just optics, deflect and say you spend a lot of your time with the engineer's in India but come to States frequently for client meetings, then offer to fly to US for key points of the contract, etc. But, the key is making people think your operations is US based in the first-impression phase.

I am not a lawyer, so this is just personal experience, not advice.

Networking is everything, most of my gigs have come from trusted contacts I worked with as an employee in a subsidiary (opened by a US company) in my own country.

Startups help here because people tend to move around with a trusted group of people. Every gig expands your network and builds more trust, so cracking those first few opportunities are important.

Navigating legal/contractual: I can't read minds but you're probably overthinking this before you've secured a gig. Contractually, things are similar to working with a company at home. A lot of the complexity will be on the US company's side for how they deal with the expense of dealing with the expense of you for their reporting requirements to state authorities like the IRS. This is why your network is so important, you have to be valuable enough so they're willing to pay for the friction.

Most of your friction and hassle will come from dealing with foreign income within your own country's tax authority. Get help from professionals but it's not insurmountable.

PLM, which OP has expertise in, is usually tied to the IT infrastructure in the digital engineering in the manufacturing industry. That's not going away anywhere soon. We are still far away from a full automation / digitalization in these areas.

What you say, makes sense! But I'm not even finding myself that much further in the sales funnel yet. I'm at the top end at the moment.

Let's say you have US presence, how do you go about customer acquisition?

(I do have a couple of friends in US, whom I can hire - these people are not core-tech, more of analyst profiles, but I will help with boots on ground, if needed.)