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How I Find Consulting Clients

gkogan.co

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Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#41

Post by gk1 »

vram22 wrote: post #40
antonkm wrote: post #28

Networking works if you do it right. Made $300k my first year from 0 using only physical networks and around $5k spending money. I'm a web developer in Sweden. For me to join a network the network has to match these criteria: * It markets itself as exclusive * It costs money (say $2k/y for small businesses and scaling prices depending on number of employees) * Participants are owners or at C-level The networks are of…

What are primed leads?

It means the lead (person) is already familiar with what you do and is interested in working with you. It's the opposite of a cold lead; someone who has never heard of you.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#42

Post by WolfOliver »

Radim wrote: post #37

For us, the door opened with open source. We maintain a few semi-popular Python packages for machine learning, which brings in enough leads to keep a team of data scientists booked for months in advance. (Funnily enough, the actual work is mostly unrelated to the open source itself.) We've been gradually increasing the project size and value, now working with companies like Amazon, Autodesk or Hearst. Helped: - hot d…

I do not have experience with it, but open source as a marketing instrument seems to be an interesting instrument. Not only for the company but also for the employees working on it. That is way I think employees are extra motivated when working on Open Source projects.

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#43

Post by mistermann »

fersab wrote: post #34
antonkm wrote: post #28

Networking works if you do it right. Made $300k my first year from 0 using only physical networks and around $5k spending money. I'm a web developer in Sweden. For me to join a network the network has to match these criteria: * It markets itself as exclusive * It costs money (say $2k/y for small businesses and scaling prices depending on number of employees) * Participants are owners or at C-level The networks are of…

Great job! However, i would like to point out that the Consulting "climate", in Sweden is very, very good and it is super-easy to find a client. Few searches and groups on linked-in will yield interviews, and there are plenty of brokers that deal with independent contractors. With that in mind 300k is a nice job still for one guy!

What sort of LinkedIn groups would be good to join to find clients?

Re: How I Find Consulting Clients

#45

Post by erroneousfunk »

samfisher83 wrote: post #2

Here is the gist of what I got from the article. Things that worked: -Blogging -Referrals through blogging -Posting comments on HNs Things that didn't work -Networking Events -Participate in marketing or consulting communities -Partner with agencies or other consultants -Hound people -Cold outreach -Advertising -Handing out business cards

I think it depends on the amount of business that you want. I do freelance as a side job and only have a few clients a year that give me an extra ~10-20k of income. I mostly do web scraping, data science, data management, and teaching (workshops, taught a couple university classes, adult education)

Networking events and word of mouth from other clients have been about half of my work, and the rest just sort of email me out of the blue based on either my LinkedIn profile or a book I wrote.

I don't blog, I don't have much of a professional website. The book I wrote is fairly popular, but I find that the people who email generally haven't read the book (although they might have bought it... to see that it's real, I guess) but they find me through that.

Will agree that cold outreach doesn't work at all unless you're doing it on a massive scale (and then you're just a professional salesperson...). I've done it, but it's literally never worked for me.

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