Ask HN: How to Become a Consultant?

In my view, it's the person who is able to understand the business problem the customer is trying to solve, then evalute if the problem is something you or your company can and want to solve. If the problem is something your company want to solve, provide the technical evidences during the due diligence process to the prospects that you can solve their problems. In my case, this also bridged nicely to help out the existing customers to get new things done quickly.

I've done this successfully for a while but not extensively, and I've watched colleagues and friends try it with mixed results, so for what its worth I've seen a few common failure modes. Roughly in order of impact.

#1 - to be a consultant you need a consulting business. If you aren't working for someone else, you need to create it. The two things technical people often totally underestimate is the sales aspect (25%+ of your time), and the time spent on other non-billable work. Unless you are pretty niche and already well known, you are likely going to have to find the (right) work more than it finds you, at least at first.

#2 Taking on too much and/or the wrong kind of work just because you can get it. If you establish yourself as a generalist, you're going to end up only competing with service companies and other generalists for lowest cost. Also, once an organization has hired you as "an X", it is harder for them to consider you as "a Y". If you do a basic programming contract with them because you need the work, you may never be seriously considered for anything else (by them). I probably said no to more than 1/2 the contracts I was offered when I started out, and it was a good choice even when I did have some down time.

#3 charging too little. You want to be doing impactful, high value work. Or else you are probably really a freelancer looking for long term contracts and work/life balance you control (not that this is a bad thing, but it's not the same)

#4 charging too much (for the work you are doing). In order to make the balance sheet work you are pricing yourself at the top of a niche and not getting enough work. Instead you should be doing something higher value. I've seen people oscillate for years on a 2 months of work, 3 months of no work, etc. cycle this way. For me this is a sign you are going after the wrong kind of work.

#5 focusing on the work you enjoy, rather than the impact you can make - this is also a viable route for a lifestyle adjustment but it's only efficient if you are lucky.

Some other thoughts:

I think there are natural sizes for this sort of business and it has implications for the types of work you compete on.

You can use sub-contractors (e.g. consultant/freelancer colleagues) to manage bandwidth a little but but there is overhead. I suspect it's a lot easier to keep 6 employees fed than 2, if you go that way.

It's sort of a restatement of #1 - but network is critical.

In cloud software at least, sales engineers/solutions architects work with the account manager to drive adoption of services. A lot about evaluating a customer's problem space or existing architecture, and proposing possible cloud-native architectures.

Sales engineers also do educational sessions and service-specific "immersion days" for the platform, which usually tie into the customer account manager's sales and advocacy for the platform, and helps to build relationships with the customer's engineering team.

I did a consulting gig for a new YC company this year and it went well. I started by reaching out to them on Work At A Startup, which led to an informal chat. I provided some background on previous experience and projects that used similar tech stacks and were in the same space.

Instead of an algorithmic interview it was really just us sitting down at a whiteboard for a few hours mapping out how the backend would work and what external APIs would be needed. I think this is the best approach -- be super transparent about what you're specialized in/and what you're not, and make sure that you're the right person for it. Providing a small amount of value upfront and for free can go a long way.

I've done a few contracts as an independent in the last two years completely agree that sales is the most important and is also the hardest.

I disagree with you when you say problem is the 0 to POC/MVP (excluding sales). I think that is the easiest and most fun part of a project. The hardest is 0 to first line of code.

When you complete part of the POC/MVP and it seems to be working, clients understand what you are worth.

In my experience, after the POC, managers had no problem boosting the budget because you've proven you can do the job and there is low risk in giving you more work and freedom to continue adding features.

I might have been lucky to get along really nicely with all of my clients yet.

Finding the initial problem is the hardest for me. All of my contracts were from previous contacts and someone knowing someone...

If anyone has it the other way around, I'd love to learn more.