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

#1

Post by modelcroissant » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

I’ve spent roughly the last decade and some change as a software engineer, and recently decided to start a solo consultancy.

I’m focused on helping SMEs sort out the messy back-office parts of the business: spreadsheet glue, brittle internal workflows, poor reporting, awkward integrations, backend/platform problems, and AI workflows that need to do real work rather than just look good in a demo.

I’m not really interested in becoming a generic agency. I’d rather work with businesses that already feel operational pain and need someone technical to help untangle it properly.

For those of you who’ve made this jump:

* how did you get your first real project? * what kind of outreach actually worked? * did your first few clients come from network, content, cold outreach, partnerships, subcontracting, or somewhere else?

Also, if anyone knows SMEs or operators dealing with this sort of mess, I’d be glad to chat.

As a gesture of goodwill, I’m offering the first 5 clients 10 hours free to help get an initial project moving.

You can find me over at https://crescita.cc

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

#2

Post by swiftcoder » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

I get basically all my contract work through folks I've worked with in the past. With a little luck, your network slowly diffuses across the industry, and when they need a heavy-hitter, they know who to call

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

#3

Post by santiagobasulto » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

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 become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.

- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.

- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you

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

#4

Post by dustingetz » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:30 AM UTC

i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.

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

#5

Post by dustingetz » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

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…

+1 about overseas freelancers. And US customer to European freelancer is not the arb it used to be. The California SaaS sector has collapsed in the wake of venture capital rotating into AI-native, saas budgets (salaries) are down, the dollar is down, and remote European salaries are up. Zoom latency across 7-8h timezone difference is workable, the current arb is to hire from further and further east. Unless there is a war disruption such as an attack on the trans Atlantic internet pipes.

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

#6

Post by sam_lowry_ » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:42 AM UTC

I was a Java programmer and administered a fairly big community website written in Drupal as a side gig, then applied to a news company that used Drupal, out of curiosity.

Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.

Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.

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

#7

Post by doublerabbit » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:46 AM UTC

10 years of normal work slop

4 years as a sub contractor for two different fortune companies (Bank and ARM)

Then head hunted from LinkedIn. Six months so far of my own gig working for a VisualFX company. Linux migration and it's tight. Everything's a mess, so I'm just riding this until.

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

#8

Post by jll29 » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

Not really a consultancy story, as we were an aspiring start-up. We had created a homepage and a LinkedIn page for our company, we wrote a business plan and talked to VCs and business angels and other start-ups to learn and raise funds - completely in vain for a year.

Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.

It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.

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

#9

Post by mvvl » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 11:01 AM UTC

My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.

Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.

On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.

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

#10

Post by aviperl » Sun, Apr 19, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC

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 and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.

Still working with them 6 years later.

I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!

Be nice on the internet, I guess.