Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm?

> more than one clear customer who already wants you

...but they only want you as a full-time contractor (i.e. an employee-in-all-but-name), is there a good way to convince them to pay for your expertise on a consulting-as-needed basis instead?

It's easy to "become a consultant" if what you really mean is signing on for fixed-length engagements to produce low-level piece-work (as e.g. an artist, or a programmer, or a content writer), but how do I break into consulting as, say, a distributed-systems scaling expert? I'm offered many opportunities by large firms to just work for them on a full-time basis as a systems architect—but I'd much rather be coming into businesses and increasing the competency of their own staff to do such jobs, so that they (eventually) don't need me.

In my experience, large businesses are interested in such engagements, but only want to hire other large businesses—consulting firms—to do it. And small businesses or startups are iffy on the concept of hiring consultants at all, preferring instead to bring all manner of expertise for one-off tasks in-house (though this myopia never seems to extend to thinking they need to employ their own accountant or lawyer, oddly enough.)

Forget the sales, soft skills, and making products for other people that will never truly appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it. Just stick to your guns and create the situation where you can just work on your own product.

If you guys are kicking ass at your current firm, you should be being paid for it, i.e. making enough to save some some money. There's your ticket. Be patient and wait it out while saving money. Plan out your upcoming product, and do all the preparation that doesn't require deep immersion, so from day one after quitting you can deeply immerse yourself.

ps. how's 7 years as a remote freelancer so different from a consulting firm? It's not. Just more developers, bigger projects. You already know what that life is all about. Do you really want to go back to that, now with the burden of supporting more engineers? Keep it simple. If you have the skills and confidence, your product idea will work out. Just create the space and time to do it.

As others have said in this thread it's all about relationships and sales. Technical ability will help you retain clients and build bigger things over longer timescales, but won't help you get clients in the first place. Also, technical ability rarely leads to happy clients - they don't review your code - but a focus on helping the client achieve their mission is the key to success.

You need to start by getting 1 client. Then 2, and so on. You don't need a website, or even the name of a company to do this. I didn't know the name of my consultancy until about 6 months into it after we were 5 full time people.

Subcontracting with other firms when you start is possible, but is mostly based on relationships, not capability. When I started I had a relationship with a design agency and they subcontracted us their heavy engineering work. In reverse, I saw this as outsourcing sales and account management to them.

To grow the business I started a meetup.com group back when meetup was just starting. There were no other groups at the time and I was able to make a good name for myself in the community which lead to word of mouth business. Once a month I would have a different big name company in town host an event where I would bring 50-80 engineer types and do some tech talks for about an hour. It took about 5 hours to organize per month and barely any out of pocket costs since companies were happy to open their spaces to technical types and provide food.

You need to figure out what you're willing to sell. Staff augmentation? Time & Materials? Contracts based on scope? They're all very different in sales process and delivery.

You need to think about account management as a real thing. Developing the empathy and focus around happy customers over "best code" or "ideal features" is critical.

Developing your sales beyond word of mouth is the hardest thing to do. Hiring a sales person alone won't do it. There are way too many small consultancies reaching out to potential customers everyday and you can't distinguish yourself from the noise. If you have a clearly differentiated product offering or services approach that a sales person can leverage to make a clear pitch that's not just "we can do your projects!" then it can work.