Ask HN: How to Become a Consultant?

You need to figure out if you just want to be an individual consultant or hire other staff. If you're looking to build out a business with employees it will be much more challenging as you will need to be a full time sales person, always making sure you have enough work in the pipeline to make sure they get paid, rule 1 is that staff always get paid before you.

I would suggest you find like minded individuals and partner up with them, that way when one of you has a bad week or you need a holiday the other/others can pick up the slack.

Seeing as you have so much experience you should be able to lean on previous employers / colleagues to get contracts, this is how we started out. Once you have a few projects under your belt and a decent website you will need to see if you're getting enough work by word of mouth from previous projects or if you need to invest in marketing. If you stay as a small team it will be much easier to do well via word of mouth if your quality of work is good. At the end of the day it's all about your network and driving quality projects into your business.

I would strongly discourage you from only bringing projects to the POC/MVP state. This is what we did initially but you need a far higher throughput of projects and you're in danger of leaving clients high and dry if they want the idea built out further.

That's how we got started anyway, best of luck with your venture!

If you can reliably find this kind of work, then go for it. But what I've seen as a consultant is that everyone likes to do that part, but what clients usually want to contract for, and what makes money is the steady, often boring, implementation part.

Targeting the MVP work you are often competing with others who will heavily discount the initial work hoping to get the lucrative implementation. What makes it harder is the uncertainty involved, there is a high bar to being trusted enough contract for something that had not been defined yet.

In the management consulting world which I am more familiar with, the distinction is between "strategy" work - the focus of well reputed (in some circles) firms with very strong networks like McKinsey, and implementation or "transformation" type work from IBM or a Big 4. The dream is to be McKinsey and come in and demonstrate a brilliant plan that others are stuck implementing, but the reality is that that kind of work is tough to sell.

Side note: How do I find consultants for: React, React-Native, Node.js servers, Chat client-servers, and architecting/planning solutions?

Can there ever be a legal issue with me getting some knowledge from others and applying it in my work?