Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat.

“How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.”

I write proposal.

You should:

1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving over the course of a month. This will push people at purchasing the product in 2 of the emails.

2) You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here’s a decision tree.

3) You should email people within 80% of their monthly quota offering a discount to move to the next higher plan.

4) You should email your entire userbase and upgrade as many as possible to annual billing for a 10% discount to the cost of their current plan.

You can tell your engineering team to do this for you, but there is 0% chance they schedule this because it is boring scutwork and they’d rather do those features you have scheduled this quarter. Or you can have me just do it. I need a commit bit and probably two weeks. It will cost you $30k per week.

Probabalistically this makes you $2 million in next 12 months but your results are your results; you keep all the upside and my invoice is due regardless.

That's a good example of a marketing consultant, but what about an engineering consultant? Would talking tech stack pros/cons pull in a similar rate?

It is weird how I get persistently drummed out of engineering because when I write cron jobs, SQL queries, and React dashboards I make special effort to connect them to business outcomes.

Businesses, to a first approximation, don’t care about their tech stack except to the extent that it drives business outcomes. Can you articulate those pros/cons in a way a business cares about? Can you impact your deliverables to reduced costs or (much better) increased revenue? Then you, too, can look forward to a bright future where HN tells you you’re not really an engineer anymore because your rates are too high.

Some folks get nervous when they have to justify the actual value of their work. Sometimes it’s because doing irrelevant work well or relevant work poorly. More often, I think the business impact connection is just difficult to make. The further you get from pure sales, the harder it is. Regardless, you should always consider answering this question as part of your job.

You really don't see why the example you gave above was marketing rather than engineering?

All of the recommendations you gave were related to selling the product, not improving it. That's not a bad thing; it just means it was a marketing consultation.

I think a clearer way to say what a lot of people are bothered by with that example is that in order to sell those recommendations you need:

a) to have a lot of marketing expertise

b) to be known well enough for your marketing expertise that people will take your suggestions as valid

Most tech people have neither one. Hell, most marketing people have neither one, half of the rest on my have b) but are actually incompetent in their recommendations, and only the last little bit have both.

Being a consultant is marketing, there is no way to be an engineering consultant. Engineers work for consultants, not as consultants.

If you want to make the big bucks, you have to do what businesses care about, not what you care about.

This is just a guess from what I've seen consultants contribute but there's usually some (at least the appearance of) low hanging fruit to cut costs on. Usually focuses on advice on how to get the AWS bill down.

I've worked as a software engineering consultant. Sometimes I would do engagements that were just analysis and advice, but for most of them I would actually design or develop some software.

What was it like making the transition from software engineer to software engineering consultant?

I'll give you my perspective: it's tough. I tried to go from ML Engineer -> ML Consultant, and while I was able to find work at a reasonable rate, it was difficult, because most businesses don't have technical problems, they have business problems.

For instance, even though the root cause might be high latency, the actual problem is that the high latency is killing your retention.

If the business is sophisticated enough to value technical expertise, often they value it so much that they are willing to hire experts full-time, or they're so small that they can't afford to. So as a technical expert, you end up caught in a weird uncanny valley (in my experience). I think that patio11's advice is, as always, spot on here; the skills needed to become a technical consultant that charges $N/week are way higher than the technical skills needed to become a business consultant at $N/week, for any value of N. That isn't to say that technical skills aren't value, just that it's a tough sell to make, for a number of reasons that patio11, and others, have written at length about.

Making the company money is the not the only factor is it? Any engineer at google/facebook/etc are probabilistically making the company multiple millions per year too (terrible estimate from revenue divided by headcount). But probably only a handful of them would ever be able to demand the rate you charge because they are replaceable.

How do you make sure the company won't just take your advice and hire a guy to do this for 90k/yr instead of letting you work on it for three weeks?

Because they don't need a full time person to achieve the results and it would be silly to shell out more money and try to train somebody to do something that they've clearly failed to do in the past. If my car needs $1000 of repairs, I'm not going to shop around for a class to teach me how to repair cars - especially if, like your example, it costs more than just getting it fixed.

If they thought they could take a proposal and productionize it with someone available for hire at a total cost of $140k in their first year and that they’re capable of finding, closing, and managing that person then a) my blog is free and you’re welcome to it and b) they would have more than one email written. But for whatever reason they have not made that hire, as evidenced by having no emails actually traversing the interwebs.

People occasionally took my proposals and productionized them with existing or (much more annoyingly) new staff. Oh well. That’s one reason I charged what I charged; the sales process assumes 1 to 3 “actually nope we decided we don’t need you” per engagement which happens.

Great point - most people are not aware that finding good personnel to hire is like diving for pearls.

You don't. You just pick the ones that are in a hiring freeze or actually see the value of what you can demonstrably deliver in a quick turnaround time

By far, the majority of consulting engagements I’ve seen or participated in (Big 4 and freelance) are things that could easily be done if the company hired a few folks, for much less pay than this. Simple number crunching, tedious paperwork review, trivial integrations/dev work.. I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of all enterprise consulting spend goes to these tasks.

However the indisputable fact is that these companies are willing to shell out for this stuff, whether because they think it’s temporary work (cheaper to hire Patrick than an FTE who you then have to keep paying or dispose of) or they’re paying for the top-of-Hill expertise (eg. paying a Big 4 where you get 10 hours of a partner’s time/expertise at 1k/hour and then 300 hours of 23yo grunt labor).

There could be a ton of reasons from covering one's behind to how things look on the books etc.

Who is the 23yo?

From the age - a fresh college graduate recruited into the consultancy employee/meat grinder.

Exactly. And not just one, each partner had a battalion of them.

I am curious how you even get into this type of work - how do you find the consulting opportunities in the first place? Do you seek out work somehow, or do you market and let the leads come to you?

Is it easier to work for a consulting company as an “employee” before venturing out alone?

Patrick talked about what he was doing so much on the internet so much that people knew he was good at it. He also talked about it at meet ups and conferences, first with other normal attendees and eventually on stage. Eventually some of those people offered him money to do it for them.

At first he undercharged, not as a tactic to start consulting but because he didn’t have confidence in what he was selling. I believe he started off at $5,000 and stopped consulting when he was charging $30,000 a week.

But most of his work came from pitching people. Write an email or make a call to a company that seems a good prospect and follow up. If five percent convert you’re doing pretty well. You also get referrals from previous satisfied customers.

As well as that Patrick wrote a lot on his website about what he did and how to do it, which functioned as a proof of competence and lead to some people contacting him to ask him to work for them. Authority, Nathan Barry, is all about this publicising proof of competence tactic.

Late to the party but I've written about what's worked for me for finding consulting clients: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...

Thanks Patrick, for just planning out for me my workload for the next month or so!

> You should email people 4 times during the trial depending on their level of engagement with it. Here’s a decision tree.

Do you have a link to an example decision tree for a typical SaaS app?

If this is what a consultant is I don't want to be one, or maybe this example is very particular to sales/marketing. Or maybe this same example can be applied to several domains meaning that as a consultant you can solve companies problems depending on your already established expertise.

It’s the second one. If you have some expertise/ mastery of best practices in your area, then you can make a good living by implementing those things for organizations that would benefit from them, but don’t want to invest in staffing up that area permanently.

That’s consulting.

If what is what a consultant is?

For most enterprise software sales, who tend to deal in a few large customers rather than lots of small ones, almost all of this would be enormously counterproductive.

If you're a software company and you have only a few customers, then you're probably doing bespoke development (whether you call that consulting or not can be your own decision), not product sales.

The entire purpose of selling a product is to scale through volume rather than customization.

To me the big divide is how superlinear your revenue:employee ratio is. If it's linear or close to it, then you're a consulting org. You make money based on the hours of work you are able to bill for in one way or another. If it's a "product", but you as the product developer are doing heavy customization, then you've just transitioned from an hourly billing model to something resembling fixed bid, but with a fiction of a product in the mix.

I think you're missing parent's point. People don't buy enterprise software (six- and seven-figure annual licenses) from a 30-day email drip. Therefore, creating such an email drip for an enterprise software company would not have the same results as it would for a B2C/B2Dev SaaS.

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