Ask HN: left the consulting company I started, what now?

We did many mistakes, starting from working in two different countries and targeting Europe as our market.

Last Monday I have decided to pull the plug and sold my 50% share of the company to my colleague and decided to go back into freelance consulting, mainly for financial reasons (I live in a very expensive city, I have a family).

I already miss running my company and I want to start something new as soon as possible. Consulting is a bitch, especially in Europe and especially with this harsh economical situation. I'm looking into creating some product: I strongly believe that automation (DevOps but also software life cycle automation) has huge potential in the enterprise world. What do you guys think? How do you cope with the entrepreneur bug?

I do not cope with that bug because it wouldn't go away - and product building is just so much fun :-) I agree that freelancing is hard, on the long run at least.

My current solution to this is to mix consulting and product building.

If you can project your cash flow, you can figure out how many days of consulting are required, and at which rate, to still keep one day or two to bootstrap your product.

Then you have to find clients that will accept to keep you around for a limited number of days per week, as well.

It usually comes with raising your rates too, because if you need to freelance full-time to support your family, then you won't be able to make spare time.

This is a topic I like to discuss a lot, so feel free to ping me anytime (thibaut.barrere@gmail.com) if you want to exchange a bit!

You are freelancing now. You are already running your own company.

You were doing consulting before, and now you are consulting in the same space. This is the same space your company was operating in but you left for financial reasons. Now you find consulting is a bitch, but apparently consulting was a bitch with the company you left.

It does sound like something needs to change.

I'm not sure anyone here can give you advice that you don't already know given you have been working in this space with your old company and now as a consultant. Maybe your partner was holding you back. Maybe you will find new inspiration by going solo. Maybe you need to move to a different area of consulting.

Products is probably a good direction to go. The big difference between products and consulting is that you can build a product and sell that product multiple times. With consulting you are limited to the time that you have in one day. If you max out your time and you still aren't where you want to be, then you have nowhere else to go but raise your rates or higher more people. If your customers will bolt when you raise your rates and you can't find more work for your new hires, then you are pretty much stuck. Maybe that was the problem with the old company?

- Server provisioning (Puppet, Chef, Pallet and so on)

- Software life cycle automation (Continuous Integration and deployment, automated testing, scaling testing to virtualized environments, static code analysis)

- Cloud-based automation - same as server provisioning but on the cloud and with different providers

Lots of enterprises don't invest much time and effort in automating their infrastructure. That leads to convoluted deployment procedures and horrible problems in production: I guess you guys know exactly what I'm talking about.