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To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

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Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#121

Post by chrisbennet »

semperdark wrote: post #119
chrisbennet wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the weird thing. I don't (market myself). I made website but I don't get leads from it. It's just a portfolio. I am very friendly and I do keep up with people I worked with decades ago but that is the extent of my "networking".

Interesting. I've heard that before, it does seem to be mostly a matter of building up a solid reputation over time and getting referrals. Thanks for the info!

I’m naturally friendly and I keep in touch with people I’ve worked with. I go out to lunch with them every now and then, etc. I keep in touch with them because I really do like them but a happy side effect is that decades after I last worked with them, they’ll contact me with work.

I know some people can go 30 years and not have any friends they used to work with. At the very least, you should make contact on LinkedIn for your (former) colleagues when you leave a job. Drop them a line once in a while. “Ping” them a text at Christmas, etc. You don’t want to wait until you need work to start building your network.

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#122

Post by rorykoehler »

oldboyFX wrote: post #113
rorykoehler wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find new customers?

For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year. We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively. It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up. We don't really do an…

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I have a lot of work through word of mouth at the moment. I was more curious how someone in central Europe (Croatia?) finds high paying customers in the US. You make it sound much simpler than I anticipated.

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#123

Post by amorphous »

I have been thinking about this for a while.

There is a lot of good advice out there. OP, Jonathan Stark (expensive problem), Philip Morgan (positioning), Double your freelancing, Patio11 etc

They all have read the same book: Positioning by Al Ries.

What the OP (and others) are saying makes total sense. If you move away from being a generalist and carve out a niche everything becomes easier: your marketing (no more job hunting, no more interviewing), the stress (no implementation "details" to deal with) and as you can charge much much more life in general.

The problem: no one can tell you how to get there. It's survivorship bias.

Some of them got there by luck or not at all (they just coach - J.Stark, for example, started with rare (at that time) mobile dev skills and now decided to do just coaching after his skills have become commoditized).

The advice can be summed up in network as much as possible, talk to lots of people, try to find common pain points and so on.

Please note: I'm not meaning to discredit anyone, I'm grateful for what they do and learned a lot from them.

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#124

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

tptacek wrote: post #101
01100011 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest failures at the software consulting houses I've worked at have come from not building adequate tooling and not establishing a framework for knowledge/skills transfer. A close runner up would be failures related to trying to build actual products. The problem with consulting though is scalability. You can make a product and recoup your NRE with the first x units, and then most of what you sell beyo…

$165/hr is not particularly high (in addition to the fact: don't bill hourly). A $3200 day is not unusually high. Product development is in some ways more gratifying than consulting. But consulting has its own rewards, too.

$3200 per day? Where do I find those people... This is Dev consulting?

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#126

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

01100011 wrote: post #120
tptacek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$165/hr is not particularly high (in addition to the fact: don't bill hourly). A $3200 day is not unusually high. Product development is in some ways more gratifying than consulting. But consulting has its own rewards, too.

Sure, you could charge a lot more depending on your role and resume. My friend is getting $165/hr doing Sr. Software work, writing code for satellites. It's a steady 40ish hour/week role, so I think that, compared to salaried senior devs in the area(i.e. not silicon valley or NYC), he's doing quite well. For comparison, I know a local engineering staffing/design services firm that charges $200/hr for principal engine…

Seems backwards, your friend should be the one making 200+

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#127

Post by oldboyFX »

rorykoehler wrote: post #122
oldboyFX wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year. We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively. It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up. We don't really do an…

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I have a lot of work through word of mouth at the moment. I was more curious how someone in central Europe (Croatia?) finds high paying customers in the US. You make it sound much simpler than I anticipated.

It is simpler than we anticipated as well. I will say that many of our past clients had something in common — a recent ugly experience with one or more other development teams.

So far we have a history of delivering on what we promised (knock on wood), and we make sure to communicate that there is a very high chance that we will be the last team they will have to hire to solve their problem.

There's one more thing... A couple of years ago we created a passion project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351) that experienced quite a lot of traffic. I'm not sure how much influence (if any) this had on our ability to find clients, but a few of them did tell us how cool it was.

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#128

Post by vram22 »

vram22 wrote: post #112
vram22 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Haha, I was a consultant and you paint a very idealistic picture of the situation. It usually went something like this in my experience: 1. I did not claim to "paint" the full picture. 2. I did not paint the picture. Was saying what my ex-manager said to me. 3. The plural of anecdote is not data. Interesting to hear of your experience, though. Regardless of your experience, systematically collecting and analyzing da…

Also, I'm well aware of the "golmaal" (Hindi slang term) that goes on in any field. Hey, it's common knowledge. But that does not invalidate work of the good actors in the field.

Sorry, I didn't explain what golmaal means in English, also may have used the wrong word. I meant something like skullduggery, but golmaal means chaos or confusion (according to Quora, at least).

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#129

Post by 01100011 »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #126
01100011 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you could charge a lot more depending on your role and resume. My friend is getting $165/hr doing Sr. Software work, writing code for satellites. It's a steady 40ish hour/week role, so I think that, compared to salaried senior devs in the area(i.e. not silicon valley or NYC), he's doing quite well. For comparison, I know a local engineering staffing/design services firm that charges $200/hr for principal engine…

Seems backwards, your friend should be the one making 200+

Why? He doesn't have to pay a sales team, marketing department, IT guy, etc. He also doesn't have a building full of engineers who he can query if he runs into something he can't handle. I would never pay an individual, regardless of whether or not they're a corp, more than I'd pay a company which provides engineering talent.

Re: To become a software consultant, avoid letting clients pay you for code (2017)

#130

Post by 01100011 »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #124
tptacek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$165/hr is not particularly high (in addition to the fact: don't bill hourly). A $3200 day is not unusually high. Product development is in some ways more gratifying than consulting. But consulting has its own rewards, too.

$3200 per day? Where do I find those people... This is Dev consulting?

Yeah, I call bullshit. Unless you're one of the top 1% of engineers in the valley or in FinTech you're not getting near that.
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