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

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'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.

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?

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.

> 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.