How I Find Consulting Clients | Hacker News Reader

How I Find Consulting Clients

gkogan.co

333 pointsgk142 comments

Networking works if you do it right. Made $300k my first year from 0 using only physical networks and around $5k spending money. I'm a web developer in Sweden.

For me to join a network the network has to match these criteria:

* It markets itself as exclusive

* It costs money (say $2k/y for small businesses and scaling prices depending on number of employees)

* Participants are owners or at C-level

The networks are often dinners where the participants get to know each other in friendly settings. I aim for networks with high middle age where I stick out as the younger (am mid-thirties) professional which connects tech with business needs (my niche).

While at a network, do not talk about yourself. Ask about others businesses and interests. These sells take between 6-12 months and are based on trust.

You also need to come prepared.

* Dress as expected.

* Have a web page with referrals so when leads get a bit nosy and Google you you're #1 in search and the page provides the lead with info about great work you've done. I have about 100 visits / mo to my page (my weird name helps for the #1 pos). 90% are primed leads.

* Know your oneliners. Prepare examples of things you can provide. Make them sound natural. Say it without selling in an informal way.

It's about being systematic and selecting only the networks where your dream leads go to. Hoping to get into invite only networks further on.

Great job!

However, i would like to point out that the Consulting "climate", in Sweden is very, very good and it is super-easy to find a client. Few searches and groups on linked-in will yield interviews, and there are plenty of brokers that deal with independent contractors.

With that in mind 300k is a nice job still for one guy!

I consider myself to be more than one person, since I have a network of dev friends. So these contacts help and I'd not be able to do those numbers without people acting as my reference.

Agree about interviews and brokers. I however have no interest on using brokers or being employed. Have gotten some really nice offers since I started consulting, Sweden is great for such opportunities.

Starting Q1 2018 I have a 90% chance landing a ~500k SEK job from an informal Facebook posting. I have no experience with dealing with clients outside of Sweden. Maybe my advice isn't applicable to the US?

What sort of LinkedIn groups would be good to join to find clients?

Hej,

- $300k SEK or USD?

- What is the name of the dinner network you joined?

- What services do you provide? Do you subcontract or do the work yourself? Hourly rate, day rate or value based project fees?

Hej!

1. ~2.4m SEK (out of this I also paid other consultants to do parts of the work plus marketing, so I got about 1m)

2. I'm in several. Some are groups based out of Chamber of Commerce. Others are based out of "Science Parks". I'm joining new networks in Stockholm this year since there's probably more work to be found there which would motivate my travel (~1½h). Haven't done the research fully on which.

3. I do the work myself and take in consultants when needed. I'm on a mix of hourly and value based, will try to change from 50/50 to 10/90 in favor of value based next year.

Hi, fellow consultant in Sweden/Stockholm here. Is it possible to contact you somehow? I can't find any contact info in your profile.

What are primed leads?

It means the lead (person) is already familiar with what you do and is interested in working with you. It's the opposite of a cold lead; someone who has never heard of you.

Got it, thanks.

As someone who does consulting, I find it interesting to read how others do it. There is a lot of advice, but I like how this article is upfront: find what works for you.

The initial leap is understanding how money and expectations balance each other out. This comes with tripping up hard at first, but it gets easier as time goes on.

For me, it comes down to giving that first hour to the client to really drill into the issue and having them see that you aren't trying to screw them over. Unfortunately, many clients have been taken hard by prior programmers, and your goal should be making the buck stop with you. They rebut you, but that's just them figuring out your honesty, and you don't convince them by saying "yes" to everything.

Even on your best, you can't satisfy everyone, but those that you do satisfy are, more often than not, willing to refer you or give more work down the line.

For us, the door opened with open source.

We maintain a few semi-popular Python packages for machine learning, which brings in enough leads to keep a team of data scientists booked for months in advance.

(Funnily enough, the actual work is mostly unrelated to the open source itself.)

We've been gradually increasing the project size and value, now working with companies like Amazon, Autodesk or Hearst.

Helped:

- hot domain (machine learning)

- positioning as problem solvers (rather than tech X vs tech Y), solving in context

- sales (me) being able to speak both the technical and business language

Waste of time (as far as leadgen):

- conference sponsorships, online ads (newsletter banners, PPC), professional marketing agencies

- any sort of academic partnerships or consortium projects

- fancy website, social media

I do not have experience with it, but open source as a marketing instrument seems to be an interesting instrument. Not only for the company but also for the employees working on it. That is way I think employees are extra motivated when working on Open Source projects.

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you."

I manage a small full-stack design and development team. After 5 year, we have a pretty steady stream of clients. It wasn't easy. I like the idea of blogging to get leads - we haven't done much of that. Most of our clients come from referrals, but I strongly disagree about the don't send cold emails bit. I started sending out about 50 cold emails per month as an exercise, and have found a number of great long-term clients. It's a low probability game for sure, but it takes me maybe 1-2 hours per month and if I get a response I can generally determine if there's a good fit within a few back and forth emails.

tldr; "there’s no magic formula, so experiment faster until you find what works for you."

Yes. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, as well as some R & D businesses. By far our most useful way of finding clients (apart from referrals) isn't even marketing, precisely: it's our blog: http://seliger.com/blog . We write about whatever we notice in grant writing, and since we're basically the only people writing honestly and directly about the field, we get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people who're interested find us that way.

It's both more effective and cheaper than Adwords. Adwords used to work really well for us, but it declined in effectiveness three to four years ago.

Would you mind sharing how you obtain the list of contacts for sending cold emails to?

i'm not this guy but this is a useful framework for sending cold emails:

https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/the-epic-guide-to-bootstr...

Send me an email and I'll share a few useful tools/companies for getting lists of cold prospects/contacts.

I use a combination of a custom scraping tool and paid curated lead services.

Here is the gist of what I got from the article.

Things that worked:

-Blogging

-Referrals through blogging

-Posting comments on HNs

Things that didn't work

-Networking Events

-Participate in marketing or consulting communities

-Partner with agencies or other consultants

-Hound people

-Cold outreach

-Advertising

-Handing out business cards

I help firms sell to business (B2B lead generation and sales) which at least rhymes with the author's consulting practice. My experience has been:

Things that worked:

+offering low cost but useful workshops/seminars

+public speaking

+referrals from existing clients

+blogging / referrals through blogging

+networking events

+participating in communities of peer consultants

+partnering with other consultants

+handing out business cards (at the end of a serious networking conversation)

+comments on HN and other entrepreneur oriented forums

Things that didn't work

-hound people (defined as contacting more than three times without a response)

-cold outreach

-advertising / sponsorship

So...your mileage may vary.

Except that networking events definitely DID work because he says that the first gig he got was through someone he met at a networking event.

And the rest was basically, "be lucky".

That gig was a lifeline, but didn't make him successful. It wasn't until he started getting visibility with the actual founders that he started to feel like he could do this as a job. Most of the don'ts are events where founders are too busy to attend or are swamped and it's almost impossible to stand out.

Really his takeaway is to make a name for yourself and the offers will roll in. Figure out a way to increase your stature or you'll never make it as a consultant. That's what all of the blog posts and hacker news articles were for, getting people who matter to know his name.

It's not "be lucky." It's "make your own luck."

I think that the whole point of that was that the networking didn't scale well.

I think it depends on the amount of business that you want. I do freelance as a side job and only have a few clients a year that give me an extra ~10-20k of income. I mostly do web scraping, data science, data management, and teaching (workshops, taught a couple university classes, adult education)

Networking events and word of mouth from other clients have been about half of my work, and the rest just sort of email me out of the blue based on either my LinkedIn profile or a book I wrote.

I don't blog, I don't have much of a professional website. The book I wrote is fairly popular, but I find that the people who email generally haven't read the book (although they might have bought it... to see that it's real, I guess) but they find me through that.

Will agree that cold outreach doesn't work at all unless you're doing it on a massive scale (and then you're just a professional salesperson...). I've done it, but it's literally never worked for me.

Hi, today I added an update to this two-year-old post and in the spirit of "shipping fast" I published it without spending too much time on editing. Let me know if you find typos, have questions that the post doesn't answer, or if something in the post doesn't hold water.

You know...I’ve never thought of shipping fast as being applicable to blogging. In some ways my blog posts fall victim to the “waterfall” development model and never end up shipping. Thank you for helping me think of that in this way.

That's exactly the problem I used to have. So I decided to just publish an MVP and then iterate on it later if a) I have something more to add, or b) the post starts getting a lot of attention. In this case both are true, so here I am touching it up on the fly.

For me it's an issue of "If I had time I'd have written a shorter letter".

Random question while I/we have your attention: I noticed you changed your homepage pretty dramatically to a "less designed" version (but more direct). It looks great. Is that showing you better results or are you still in the midst of experimenting?

PS - hi! :)

Hey Noah :)

Glad you think so. I haven't tested it because conversion volume is so low (going for quality > quantity). I opted for the simple site so that:

a) I don't spend time/money on designing or nitpicking, which can turn into a real time-suck for me.

b) It loads super fast. I'm using Netlify for static hosting.

c) Reader's attention is focused on the copy.

awesome, and makes sense. maybe the subject of a future blog post :) thanks and stay well!

Apart from writing blog posts another good way to get clients is to give relevant high quality talks at meetups and conferences.

This has worked for me on multiple occasions. Pretty much every conference I have spoken at as a consultant has resulted in several leads or a contract.

In our case:

    - Referrals from the network (e.g. VC to portfolio)
    - Cold outreach, once
    - (mostly) old colleagues getting a new job and asking us for help

Anecdotally, I am so frustrated with the high number of low quality job applicants that I've started contacting top answerers on StackOverflow whose answers meet our standards. It's a great signal as the people we chatted to that way were always motivated, experienced and professional... and usually only available on a contracting basis.

This is interesting. I am planning to start doing consulting into the analytics industry and started a blog 6 months ago. So far, just by adding a "free call" page and writing few blog posts, I got a couple of leads. It's not much, but it's encouraging. I am now in the process of writing an ebook which I will sell for $100 or so and see what happens there. I do plan to test online ads for the ebook. The idea would be to use the ebook to build a customer base for consulting, let's see. Writing an ebook it's not easy, but it is helping me a lot to better understand my potential customers and define my consulting product a bit more.

I have started to give consulting a serious go since 2nd quarter of this year as income from my own products are drying up. So far, I have tried following venues to attract potential clients:

- UpWork (sending at least 20 proposals per month) - Social Media (LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook & Twitter) - Blog

So far getting major work from UpWork with one client from Reddit and FB each. Blog gets views but no conversions yet.

I would say that in the end there are only 2 ways:

- network with, or better, befriend potential clients. Knowing your market is crutial.

- make good work to get future referrals and speak about it (blog, forums, public speaking) to get leads.

The optimal percentage of these 2 approaches depends on your personality and the stage of your consultancy (just starting, long time in the market, etc). As anecdotes, one friend, as an housing architect (and the best seller I ever met) finds his clients always during nightlife. By the other hand, my father, as a tradesman, gets clients only by referrals. After 30y it's more than enough for him. He doesn't even has any online presence.

There is no easy way. I have worked in different spheres and understand that to make any business work well it needs to be capable of becoming a full-flung manifestation with an office space and receptionist (ready to work around the clock for global ideals) that can canter and monitor networks like Facebook, Twitter and more. You never know from where a client will try to reach you.

Just curious, what do you use as your blogging platform? Any specific templates/themes?

It’s Jekyll hosted on Netlify. The theme is the default Jekyll theme with a few small modifications.

I was a business owner before I became a tech guy. Living in a country with good rule of law and meeting customers face to face will help you get your first consulting clients much faster.

I recommend being honest about the proposed solution and the time frame required to meet those expectations. Customer usually doesn't know what they need. They ask for a perfect solution. But you gotta show them why the pursuit of chasing perfection is futile for their business, specially in tech where doubling a seemingly simple metric might end up accounting for 10x the engineering cost.

Here is an example, some time back I contracted a customer with 10K clients in production delivering 400-500 average RPS. The customer wanted real time stats which is hard to do with that much data as it included many dimensions, I proposed a solution which was 10x cheaper and had a delay of 1 minute. The business owner initially wanted 1 second delay but at the end was happy with my solution.

You might not be so confident while talking with the customers but that's ok, just take the problem home, think over it and come back with a solution. As a business owner, I never really wanted a rockstar, I just wanted someone who I can rely upon and you'll be amazed how many failed to deliver just that. You might think that the people with money can always find better folks who can solve their problem faster with a better solution but that's not what happens in practise. I always had all money but still failed to find solutions to my problem. Yea, well that's my own experience :)

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