Ask HN: Why nobody cares about good engineering rather than how to reduce costs?

For the last 6 months, I have been running consulting business with not so much great success. My initial goal was to build small 5+ boutique company and that's it. However, the expectations met the reality. Right I just have one permanent project and just lost one more because of lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases I have ever seen. However, it's been more like a contractor than software consulting business. It does not scale.

I assume working 12-14h per day for 5-6 months does not work. I was doing cold emails or approaching people and everybody says NO NO NO. Event I bought a formal suit for a meeting. The person don't event respond after the meeting. I sent a follow up email and no response. Very professional? I have more 12+ years experience working for well know companies in cloud and dev tools field. And What? It looks like that the engineer skills and knowledge are commodity for everybody.

Being one man show is hard. Any suggestions what I am doing wrong?

Your whole mindset is wrong. Think of it from the perspective of people you are cold calling. They arent engineers, all they see is the finished app or website. They just want somwthing that works. When you buy laundry detergent, do you care about the active ingredient or how it was produced? All you care about is does it clean your clothes. These are small companies not looking to scale, so good engineering doesnt lead to greater sales. It doesnt add value

Also I'm going to assume English isn't your first language. If you are to English speakers you really need to work on your language skills

I'm also going to be brutally honest if you have 12 plus years experience and you don't understand the nature of business then perhaps you should have someone help you on that end because understanding why people don't need great engineering

Welcome to the indie game.

The first realization is that despite you have 12+ yrs of experience it's only functioning as a tiny cog in a larger operation whereby most of the work was out of sight and out of mind for you.

Everything from advertising to marketing to sales to business management to account management to billing, to project management, to development to deployment to support now falls on your shoulder.

And guess what, engineering for most businesses are the least expensive line item.

You probably want to match your last salary, so say you were making $150k/yr then really you have to find $200k for 2000 billable hours. That's $100/hr.

In terms of contractor rates that's pushing towards the top end of the market when most devs are hovering around the $25 to $60/hr range.

So really, to make that $100/hr billable rate you will have chase a lot to deliver that kind of value.

Most small-medium sized business aren't interested in nursing an engineer/developer/consultant for $16k/mo. They'll only be interested in maybe a half-day or day rate.

Even then the only value add you can bring to the table is to reduce costs for them. No one cares about how much effort or work you put in. You're not an employee to them. You are the consultant. They're purchasing an end product.

You either get real quick at being efficient or you're gonna wash out.

Large sized business would rather hire unless you possess some specialization they lack or is under market. So you have to punch above your weight class. Are your skills really worth $200/hr? If so, then you have the means to get those jobs by offering $100/hr. But, then again, if you were able to get that type of pay you would have just gotten a job.

To be independent, cashflow management is now the most important thing. Followed by your sales management. To then lastly your engineering skills.

All in all, it's likely your first 1 to 2 year you'll be making far under market until you've established a roster of clients.

The inevitability is that you'll have to turn to an agency model and hire others to scale. Which presents another series of problems to your plate. At that point you might as well just be another business manager hiring out technologists contractors who are trying to convince you that they're worth $100/hr that you then have to flip and sell for more than that.

Good luck.

Good engineering does reduce costs. Or it increases revenue. Those are the only two things that make engineering "good" in the eyes of those who pay for engineering services.

From my POV, the problem with consulting is that large companies either recognize how important software is for their success and develop it in-house or are foolish enough to outsource it to large consulting players (IBM, Accenture, some Indian firms). They mostly have no interest in a tiny consulting shop, which is a shame for you, because they have tons of money to spend. Unfortunately, this leaves you mostly serving all remaining parts of economy (mid and small companies, software startups etc.), which is far less juicy. Interestingly, in my country (Poland) some large corps (a large telecom for example) are open to throwing a smaller and less important projects towards a newcomer - but for an unattractive, fixed price (they want to see if you can deliver on the same level as the big players, but for much less). So again, you're being squeezed.

Of course, all of this is true assuming you're doing commodity software development. I imagine it's very different if you have an expert niche knowledge that is in demand (like security perhaps?).