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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why people consider consulting to be a "treadmill". For me, a consulting gig is an instantaneous injection of capital and another 6-9 months runway for the entrepreneurial stuff.

I mean, a 1-month gig will pay your rent for the year. Another one will pay for your servers, hosting, dev machine and food. The rest of the time is yours to spend as you like.

Is it possible that people are doing "consulting" work for <$50/hr and mistaking it for the real thing? That, in my mind, is not consulting but rather "being taken advantage of." Especially if you do it in an office surrounded by other employees in a similar position.

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Consulting is a pie-eating contest where the reward is more pie. If you're good, you get just enough work to keep you from doing something else. I know I'm not alone here.

Reduce your personal expenses and you can acquire a surplus. If you let your personal expenses expand to meet your cash flow, you'll never have excess cash flow to do with as you please.

Indeed, that's essentially another way to rewrite what I said above, though perhaps a bit of a pessimistic one.

If you're just squeaking by, getting enough consulting work to pay the bills, then your schedule is likely pretty open most of the time. Unless you're spending 28 hours a week chasing work, you should have plenty of time for entrepreneurial stuff.

And of course, if you're working 20+ hours a week on billable consulting work and just squeaking by, you're simply not charging enough.

> getting enough consulting work to pay the bills

"Consulting" does not just pay the bills. You're thinking of freelancing for dipshit entrepreneurs who think $10k will buy them the next facebook.

$10k might very well buy the next facebook, in the startup stages. It wasn't always this big. All it takes is the right idea and some money to pay the bills.

> $10k might very well buy the next facebook

Get the fuck out of here. The amount of engineering the founders put into facebook far outpaces $10k. You're living in a fantasy land.

My point is that those founders didn't draw a salary until well after they had a value proposition for investors.

Or to put it another way, Stephen and I have put > $400,000 of hours into Gridspy, but our costs are limited to board prototyping, outsourced layout and web hosting. For most internet startups, costs are perhaps $10,000 per founder for 3 months + hosting (perhaps $100/mo until there is enough traffic to drive ads).

It only gets expensive when you need to bring in contracting help. That is why it pays to be a switched on hacker in this game.

Remember, the giants weren't always giants. As they transitioned to giants, there were doing it with VC money - not founder's cash.

Don't look at the destination and get put off. Take it one step at a time. You can probably get to traction with $10k.

One further point. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that facebook is burning through $1m per day now.

http://www.google.co.nz/#hl=en&q=facebook+burn+rate would seem to agree with me ($200m per year perhaps).

> Is it possible that people are doing "consulting" work for <$50/hr

Ding Ding Ding. Real consulting starts at $100/hr and has no cap on effective rate. One month of this should pay one person's bare-bones living expenses for at least one year.

"Freelancing" is the term most people think of when talking about bullshit web programming jobs that pay very little. They only take these jobs because they've failed to save up enough money to say "no" and they lack the experience to know that real money can be made consulting.

WherE do you get the consulting gigs typically? Almost all leads I get(good and bad, pay wise) come in form of a project with fixed cost attached.

If the budget is bad, push for reduction of scope. If they won't budge, run.

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