| Optimising for sales at the beginning is just not worth the time. You have to start with word of mouth to test out whether your offering is really going to work, with kindly/friendly people who already know you as a person and aren't going to panic and get demanding in a way that a customer can do with someone they don't know from Eve. And you'll need to be earning enough to at least partly offset the raid on your savings to give you time to think through sales strategies. Freelance devops is often _not_ fun though; your biggest challenge will be controlling the seemingly unbillable work that you end up doing where people really only want to phone you up and get advice. Goodwill kills, so set boundaries with your early clients. So if you are wise you will have a consultancy package that you can use to control that. And you'll have some sort of pre-paid token/bucket/time allocation system that encourages your clients to use your time wisely for the small stuff, so you can concentrate on the bigger stuff. (When I say “if you are wise” I don’t mean to patronise. I mean “don’t just pretend it’ll be OK like I did”.) Further thoughts (learned the hard way) Consider how your off-ramps are going to work. Clients who are dependent on you but always make the cheap/expedient choices can become a millstone: they have to take your advice or you will end up resentful. And consider how you are going to manage price rises. |
This has been my strategy so far. I got laid off 9 months ago and I've barely touched my severance, but I'm also making way less than before and not really saving any money. Could be worse I suppose.