| I work for a reasonably high end software consulting firm. We find most of the work through word of mouth or in-bound responses due to projects we've put on the web. Two suggestions: 1. Patrick McKenzie (http://www.kalzumeus.com/; patio11 on HN) has a lot of brilliant work up talking about his consulting work, consulting work in general. Give him a read. 2. Focus on solving business problems, not technical problems, and start approaching people that you think would make a lot of money if you solved one of their problems. Customers rarely push back if you make them more money than you cost them (to an absurd degree- it's shocking how much you can charge for a recent grad's time). Regarding your plan: - I don't know if you need to prepare a portfolio site. If you have a strong portfolio & can offer references/testimonials, that's probably sufficient. - I don't even know if you need to make the workflow stable as long as it's profitable. If you have the product people working as contractors, then you can get by with instability. Also, charging large amounts helps substantially as you can spread out the cash over time rather than having to constantly search for work. Regarding your questions: - As mentioned above, you want to find people who have business problems that you can solve. The best way to do that is to meet lots of people and ask them about their business problems. Lecture 19 of "How to Start a Startup" has a good discussion of this [1, 2]. I would start looking at large organizations in your area who aren't tech companies. Governments will often have public bid processes that you can start applying for. I would not prioritize online sales channels over local ones. I think consulting really only works when it's enterprise focused, as that's when you can charge the large rates to justify your time & overhead. That's going to necessarily be in person due to the way that enterprise sales works (unfortunately). However, internet marketing can work well. We've had a lot of success attracting in-bound interest from viral posts on social media (visualizations, projects, etc.). - I wouldn't partner up with firms like yours. I would partner up with firms that lack the expertise. e.g. large management consultancies like Deloitte (easier said than done). I'm happy to provide more specific advice over email. My email's in my profile. [1]: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ [2]: Transcript: https://genius.com/Tyler-bosmeny-lecture-19-sales-and-market... |