tl;dr - s/w product dev shop, few months in business, looking for benchmarks/advice.

I'm an experienced engineer and product/eng leader. Earlier this year I started a software dev shop, after having been in engineering and product IC and leadership roles for over a decade. I mostly worked at early stage startups, so my consultancy focuses on helping non-tech founders build MVPs. I work with talented freelancers to do a lot of the dev heavy lifting and focus more on product/technical review/problem solving and play the role of the lead who gets it done well. I also focus a lot on finding new business.

I've worked with 4 clients so far but given that I work with founders/early stage cos, they haven't been particularly cash rich projects. Biggest one was 15K spread over 2 months. My margin has roughly been 40-50% on each project so far.

Those of you who've been in this business for 2+ years now, I'm curious how it's worked for you and what advice you would have for yourself starting out or for me. My goal is to build a healthy income (200k+) for myself. I'm not looking to build a $multi-million consulting practice but it'd be great to get to a million or high six-figures in billings.

How did you grow from a few one-off clients to a healthy pipeline of new business? How does one outgrow this phase where business only comes from your network?

How long did it take you to cross $1M in billings/yr?

What's the typical client you work with? early stage? mid-sized/large companies? founders? are you focused on a niche?

I understand what I'm offering is a commodity service but I try to focus on my USP of bay-area based strong technical leader/fmr founder who you can trust with owning product development. This doesn't scale though - I can't be doing 8 projects. The easier path to the money I want to make would be to just freelance at a high rate but I am looking to grow this as a business, not as a solo practice.

Can you share your learnings?