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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

This is an underrated path, IMO.

Consulting is an excellent way to hone the non-coding skills necessary for bootstrapping a company: Scoping projects, timeline estimation, choosing tradeoffs, finishing things, selling things, presenting products to others.

It's also helpful to be able to get out and talk to other businesses and people on a regular basis. Bootstrapping can be extremely lonely in a way that is hard to understand if you've only ever worked inside of companies with people to talk to.

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Consulting is a great way to make money, period. A decently talented software developer can amass enough projects to overtake their salary at any desk job. However, I would not recommend using consulting income to supplement entrepreneurship nor to expose yourself to product ideas. The best product ideas come from experiencing some pain point yourself (as the "buyer") and meeting other buyers who, like you, know exactly what is painful and why. This is something that you cannot really experience as an outsider.

VCs actively dissuade founders from doing professional services.

Sure! If you're dumping a bunch of capital into something, you want to see that capital put to work immediately growing something to scale-- not for founders to be worried about stretching the capital by picking up nickels off the street.

That is, being capital efficient is good, but being distracted by other non-core things excessively to try and conserve capital is bad.

But that doesn't mean that bootstrapping with a consultancy isn't a viable path. It's only when you do it when you have capital sitting around that's not put to good use that it's a problem.

VC’s don’t want you distracted from their one shot at your next 18 months. They’d rather you go for broke and flame out rather than building a 5-year runway that allows you to slowly tune your ideas.

Neither is better than the other, but one might be better for a given situation.

I guess it's because VCs are are after the exponential growth that is possible with a hit B2C product but not realisticly possible with B2B. B2B can generate pretty solid incomes though. My previous employer had 15-20 clients, around 2M EUR yearly revenue, a solid 20% margin, with 30 employees. Fintech.

Lots of B2B products sell into huge growing markets that leave a lot of room for a high CAGR for many years (e.g. exponential growth).

There is kind of a conflict of interest here, no? Providing professional services can raise capital very quickly. Connects you to potential buyers. Provides guidance. Sounds like the same thing a VC gives you, but you retain all the ownership of your company.

Although they should not dismiss it at all as it can lead to extremely successful companies. I have Dataiku or UIPath (they did it for years) as good examples. They leveraged their existing customers to test their first product, with success.

Because they don't want you helping near-domain competition with the application of the special sauce they just paid for. They didn't buy your app, they bought your time.

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