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Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#121

Post by guzfip »

mekoka wrote: post #109
guzfip wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#122

Post by jasonjayr »

mcook08 wrote: post #45

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…

How did you get a RFP? Is there feeds that can be picked up ?

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#124

Post by calvinmorrison »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #3

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 b…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#125

Post by calvinmorrison »

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#126

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

gizzlon wrote: post #113
santiagobasulto wrote: post #3

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 b…

> 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

Absolutely none of those are “specialties” that will set you apart

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#127

Post by resonious »

mekoka wrote: post #109
guzfip wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#128

Post by InexSquirrel »

aviperl wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

#129

Post by InexSquirrel »

gizzlon wrote: post #113
santiagobasulto wrote: post #3

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 b…

> 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.

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