Ask HN: Advice for a Generalist Going Solo?

In my mind, being a solopreneur is all about lead flow; that's the toughest part for me. I leaned heavily on my network as they knew the quality of my work and I didn't have to sell them much. I'd start reaching out to everyone who you have worked with in the past decade and letting them know you are looking. My favorite phrasing, which doesn't put past contacts on the spot, is "I'm looking to do XYZ. Do you know anyone who is looking for such help?"

I'd go looking for work 6-8 weeks before my contract ended (I tended to have 1-2 at a time).

You could also look at productized services, though I didn't do much of that. More on that here: https://neilpatel.com/blog/productized-services/ Maybe a 'startup package' which handles most of the toil to get an org set up?

But traction will take 2-3x longer than you think, and an unexpected stream of “one-offs” will eat your runway.

So be extremely conservative on costs from the very beginning.

Right now I'm doing all of that at our startup and would love to find an individual with this exact skillset so that I can focus more on hiring, product, and growth.

To my surprise though, as I got more and more general the rates I could demand got lower and lower, even though I had all these successful projects and good references etc. I finally picked up on the fact that the only companies who would consider a generalist either didn’t know what they were doing, or couldn’t afford an expert in the specific skills they needed.

Decided to specialize in something in-demand, and life got a lot easier.

1) Doing business in a foreign country is hard. Your two options are to target your new country or target your home country. If you target your home country, meeting with potential clients is going to be hard due to the physical distance and the time zone difference. If you target your new country, you're going to be at a disadvantage from a language and business relations perspective. Also, pretty much every country is inferior to the U.S. in terms of business development. Companies outside of the U.S. can be much more risk adverse and unlikely to do business with an upstart.

2) Getting a cofounder is really important. Moving to a different country can be lonely, and running a business can be stressful with a lot of failures. You need a partner in your business to lean on and to fill in for your weaknesses.

3) Have a good idea of your business plan before you start. You should basically have people lined up to use your product before you build anything. If you don't have that, it's likely you won't have a product people want once you build your product.

However, I find once I get in and do my specialty, I'll then generalize and flex as the project needs me. I am paid to be nice and make problems go away, above all.

If you're planning to work with one at a time, you can avoid the overhead and costs of running your own company by convincing desirable companies to simply hire you.

Based on your original description - you are an expert in "back office" skills.

In the short term, helping friends and people you meet find their dream jobs almost always pays off in a good friendship, intros, and occasionally sub-market help when those individuals are looking to broaden their skills and you want to take a risk / increase capacity. It can feel scary to add payables, but it's much easier to sell when you can confidently go into a meeting and say: I/ we've never done that before, but we have a really healthy network to pull fresh devs from, it mitigates very legit concerns of on the job training. Any savvy client that's going to challenge you to bring your A game will sniff out being oversold from your first conversation.

Also, don't overstay. Especially right now, with startups having real concerns about their ability to raise, getting 2 projects with a few months in gap from the same client can be a great way for you to have a natural renegotiation about rates, work-style, etc without running the risk of bikeshedding, which is bad for everyone (your skills will suffer, making it harder to write clean, short proposals). This habit allows you time to make sure you've got good deal-flow and that you're showcasing work regularly, and you stay relevant.

Crypto space does not, the more you can do, the more value you can extract

easy to miss that this is what's happening, but private sector failed to value a skillset and another sector did not

You’ll find people on a similar path.

* To do well, you'll need to learn how to consult -- your skill set and the skill set of consulting are two very different things.

* Even as a generalist, you need to figure out what you can do better than anyone else. That might be a specific skill or it might be particularly compelling packaging of your skills but, either way, you have to stand out. If you don't, you're competing on price and client stupidity, and both are a good way to be frustrated and poor.

* Have rules and stick to them. Mine were always: No clients who had never hired a consulting solution in my space before, because the training-wheels stage takes time. And no clients who were so small that the owner was my primary point of contact -- when you're spending your contact's butter-and-egg money, it makes for messier engagements.

* Learn to sell. You'll want to believe that you can do in on social media, do it with the strength of your existing network, blah, blah, blah. Nope -- all of those things will eventually fail you and you won't have developed the sales muscle to get through the dip. You have to get good at aggregating and then talking to strangers. convincing them of your value. Related: Set your rate high enough that you are living good on 1,000 hours of billable work a year or less. That gives you a lot of time to market.

* There's unreasonable value in being easy to work with. Fixed fees. One-line invoices. Charging a high-enough rate that it's easy to say yes to minor scope tweaks without having to change the contract. Stuff like that stands out.