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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

> As somebody who is a skilled backend developer the value I provide is not as measurable

Learn to do something which is more measurable, or figure out ways to measure some particular aspect of value you can bring. In back-end software, it will most likely be around performance or security. Doing a security audit then proposing remediation... if the company has already been hacked, they (should) understand the value rather quickly. If not... it would be a harder sell.

Performance? Would be hard, I think, without being a brand and people seeking you out. Speeding up an ecommerce site can definitely have measurable impact on bottom line but... if a company is big enough where that would have meaningful impact, they probably already have a team of people to navigate through to convince them of your value/skill/ability.

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It's not hard in my experience. Not as easy as convincing CEO to do two redesigns per year, but not hard.

I work with companies operating at a large scale. Downtime costs $xxx,000/minute.

Developers cost lots of money, improving their productivity by a little bit pays huge dividends.

If the company has big events like Black Friday or Superbowl commercials, keeping the site up during those events is worth paying for.

Many not so big companies spend 6 figures per month in AWS bills.

Lots of work for a backend consultant.

If you have the experience and/or brand/name already, it wouldn't be hard. My thinking was not so much the work, but the finding people and convincing that a) you can do the work and b) they need it done. If you're successfully doing this now - props to you! If you have any specifics you can share about how you got through a and b above... would love to read more.

I think you need to go through the same steps that Patrick outlined:

* do work for someone you know

* write a case study documenting success

* repeat with a slightly bigger customer

They usually reach out to me or are referred to me via a friend. One time I had a friend doing some work for Vodafone Australia, and he just asked me to come out for a month long engagement to help them get ready for the iPhone 5 (which turned out to be the 4s iirc). Another time I co-founded a Meetup group in a relatively new technology and a startup wanted to leverage that so they wanted some help getting started and having some good patterns to follow.

So I guess I would counter what you said with experience/network rather than a brand.

Do you think there are 1-5 person companies doing millions annually with an ecom site?

There are definitely small (<10 people) companies doing millions with ecommerce. My inclination is that most of them are doing some/all via Amazon these days. But even outside of Amazon yes, there are some people doing that. Headcount is less important than technical headcount - there may be 8 people in the company, but they just outsourced a woocommerce shop and market the heck out of it.

Margins matter too, not just headcount. Someone could do $2m/year but make less than someone doing $800k/year with better margins.

Doing perf/security reviews of a niche like that (woo, magento, etc) would probably still be a place to focus and make money, if you want to stay 'back end' (or at least technical). But even then, some of the measurable stuff will be needed - "we reduced the load times by 45% on the checkout page, and conversions went up 17%, adding $87k in profit last year".

Would it be easy to find these clients?

Security stuff is notoriously difficult for demonstrating any kind of value.

99% don't care unless and until they get hacked, they will also forget about it all in 2 months.

If they don't get hacked for years they will just attribute that to luck and probability, not valuable security consulting.

And if they do... you can guess that one.

There is a big market around security audits and certifications. They don't pay by value provided, there is hardly anything measurable, but they pay good rates for professional specialized work that has to be done.

Yes but it tends to be around bigger companies.

Lots of smaller businesses just don't care. They also don't have "chief somethings" to tell them it's important, or to do it to save their own asses just in case.

They just fly blind and in many cases they get lucky which further solidifies their beliefs.

And in the odd case when they get screwed they just bury it and move on.

Or post a "we are very sorry! security is our TOP PRIORITY!" message somewhere and move on.

I mean just look at the Equifax fiasco. Then scale that down to the smaller companies and see what you end up with...

Small companies rarely take consultants of any sort at any decent rate.

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