Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

I get basically all my contract work through folks I've worked with in the past. With a little luck, your network slowly diffuses across the industry, and when they need a heavy-hitter, they know who to call

General consultancy is an extremely crowded space. As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.

My advice would be to differentiate yourself:

- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.

- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.

- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you

i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.

I was a Java programmer and administered a fairly big community website written in Drupal as a side gig, then applied to a news company that used Drupal, out of curiosity.

Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.

Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.

10 years of normal work slop

4 years as a sub contractor for two different fortune companies (Bank and ARM)

Then head hunted from LinkedIn. Six months so far of my own gig working for a VisualFX company. Linux migration and it's tight. Everything's a mess, so I'm just riding this until.

Not really a consultancy story, as we were an aspiring start-up. We had created a homepage and a LinkedIn page for our company, we wrote a business plan and talked to VCs and business angels and other start-ups to learn and raise funds - completely in vain for a year.

Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.

It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.

My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.

Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.

On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.

I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.

Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.

Still working with them 6 years later.

I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!

Be nice on the internet, I guess.

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Freelancing & someone simple email, nothing special

First: Flew to California on whim after meeting some other devs in an IRC chat. Second: I kid you not, playing pool in a bar.

Hi, I did the same for a while.

Offer to help them solve a few small problems, and then deliver.

1. SEO and Linkedin https://www.amazingcto.com - best was connecting Google Search Console via MCP to Claude Code CLI for optimizations of landing pages.

2. Semrush has a free tier that works for me for SEO.

3. GEO (AI optimizations), AIs return me when people ask about "CTO Coach"

*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.

People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.

As a consultant I got my first project through a former colleague who referred me to the organization looking for a consultant.

It's not easy to find consultations out of the blue, I have gotten one by apply to a public call looking for a consultant that I am in the being interviewed process now, but referrals are far more easier.

Absolutely easiest way is to find some consultant work sales agency that takes a commission when they manage to sell you somewhere. At least where I live there are multiple options, just list yourself (or your company) there.

Also you don't have to do the sales work yourself and they find suitable customers for you etc, it's totally worth the price especially if you are just starting

Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.

Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.

Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.

Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)

I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.

Recommendations from past workplaces and networking. Honestly never heard of anyone else being hired as a solo contributor outside those channels.

Identify who your buyer is. It’s probably not a technical person (and thus HN isn’t a great place to advertise).

Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)

For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.

Just my $0.02 of course, circumstances may vary

It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).

Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.

This was a long time ago but I got an article published in Byte Magazine back when Byte mattered. Got a phone call a couple of weeks after it was published.

Whats your actual tech experience?

Most enterprises that need consultants are using Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Dynamics, etc. If a company has an engineering department to build and run internal software, they very rarely need a consultant. And if they don't, they are very unlikely to higher a consultant to build it custom. They'd want "out of the box" because they think (often incorrectly these days), it will be easier to maintain.

I worked on an open source application, and some people wanted to use parts of it as a library in their commercial applications. So I started a consultancy due to that demand. I still had a regular job at the same time though, so there was never a need to gather enough clients to make a living out of the consultancy job.

Things I learned:

- Get an accountant ASAP, even if the income is small. Just the peace of mind that my taxes were being filed correctly was worth the cost.

- You don't need a perfect solution from the start, you are working with your client towards something they can use.

- You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.

- Almost all clients wanted me to either come work for them or sell all (rights of) my work to them. This is understandable from their side, but if you want to stay independent you need to set some boundaries.

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