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How I Find Consulting Clients

gkogan.co

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Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#11

Post by crdb »

In our case:

    - Referrals from the network (e.g. VC to portfolio)
    - Cold outreach, once
    - (mostly) old colleagues getting a new job and asking us for help
Anecdotally, I am so frustrated with the high number of low quality job applicants that I've started contacting top answerers on StackOverflow whose answers meet our standards. It's a great signal as the people we chatted to that way were always motivated, experienced and professional... and usually only available on a contracting basis.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#12

Post by gk1 »

thestepafter wrote: post #8
finkin1 wrote: post #3

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out ab…

Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?

Send me an email and I'll share a few useful tools/companies for getting lists of cold prospects/contacts.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#13

Post by mlevental »

thestepafter wrote: post #8
finkin1 wrote: post #3

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out ab…

Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?

i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails:

https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstr...

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#14

Post by finkin1 »

thestepafter wrote: post #8
finkin1 wrote: post #3

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out ab…

Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?

I use a combination of a custom scraping tool and paid curated lead services.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#15

Post by needcaffeine »

gk1 wrote: post #7

Hi, today I added an update to this two-year-old post and in the spirit of "shipping fast" I published it without spending too much time on editing. Let me know if you find typos, have questions that the post doesn't answer, or if something in the post doesn't hold water.

You know...I’ve never thought of shipping fast as being applicable to blogging. In some ways my blog posts fall victim to the “waterfall” development model and never end up shipping. Thank you for helping me think of that in this way.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#16

Post by gk1 »

needcaffeine wrote: post #15
gk1 wrote: post #7

Hi, today I added an update to this two-year-old post and in the spirit of "shipping fast" I published it without spending too much time on editing. Let me know if you find typos, have questions that the post doesn't answer, or if something in the post doesn't hold water.

You know...I’ve never thought of shipping fast as being applicable to blogging. In some ways my blog posts fall victim to the “waterfall” development model and never end up shipping. Thank you for helping me think of that in this way.

That's exactly the problem I used to have. So I decided to just publish an MVP and then iterate on it later if a) I have something more to add, or b) the post starts getting a lot of attention. In this case both are true, so here I am touching it up on the fly.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#17

Post by jseliger »

finkin1 wrote: post #3

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you." I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out ab…

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you."

Yes. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, as well as some R & D businesses. By far our most useful way of finding clients (apart from referrals) isn't even marketing, precisely: it's our blog: http://seliger.com/blog . We write about whatever we notice in grant writing, and since we're basically the only people writing honestly and directly about the field, we get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people who're interested find us that way.

It's both more effective and cheaper than Adwords. Adwords used to work really well for us, but it declined in effectiveness three to four years ago.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#19

Post by reificator »

gk1 wrote: post #16
needcaffeine wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know...I’ve never thought of shipping fast as being applicable to blogging. In some ways my blog posts fall victim to the “waterfall” development model and never end up shipping. Thank you for helping me think of that in this way.

That's exactly the problem I used to have. So I decided to just publish an MVP and then iterate on it later if a) I have something more to add, or b) the post starts getting a lot of attention. In this case both are true, so here I am touching it up on the fly.

For me it's an issue of "If I had time I'd have written a shorter letter".

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#20

Post by xstartup »

I was a business owner before I became a tech guy. Living in a country with good rule of law and meeting customers face to face will help you get your first consulting clients much faster.

I recommend being honest about the proposed solution and the time frame required to meet those expectations. Customer usually doesn't know what they need. They ask for a perfect solution. But you gotta show them why the pursuit of chasing perfection is futile for their business, specially in tech where doubling a seemingly simple metric might end up accounting for 10x the engineering cost.

Here is an example, some time back I contracted a customer with 10K clients in production delivering 400-500 average RPS. The customer wanted real time stats which is hard to do with that much data as it included many dimensions, I proposed a solution which was 10x cheaper and had a delay of 1 minute. The business owner initially wanted 1 second delay but at the end was happy with my solution.

You might not be so confident while talking with the customers but that's ok, just take the problem home, think over it and come back with a solution. As a business owner, I never really wanted a rockstar, I just wanted someone who I can rely upon and you'll be amazed how many failed to deliver just that. You might think that the people with money can always find better folks who can solve their problem faster with a better solution but that's not what happens in practise. I always had all money but still failed to find solutions to my problem. Yea, well that's my own experience :)

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