[rwhitman]

Here are several reasons, from experience -

1) Consultants live off of short term payouts. Its a challenging business leap to go from getting paid lump sums now to building something essentially on spec and hoping for a payout later.

2) When you are a consultant, your time is typically tied to billable hours. It becomes extremely difficult to sacrifice billable hours in the short term with hopes for it performing well in the future.

3) Taking resources away from clients to work on an internal project narrows the bandwidth you have for taking on more clients.

4) Consulting work typically is linear - in that you build once, to the client's spec, release it and then move on to the next project. Its rare to be in it for the long haul, improving on different iterations and monitoring performance. This is a big mental gap when building a product - its not just a single launch and done like a client project. Its a long term process nurturing and iterating until the product is successful. We consultants just don't have enough experience in this, and have become pretty hardwired to projects being "done" and instant payouts at launch time. Personally, I've struggled with this a lot in the past and am still learning how to break free of this "one and done" mentality.

So basically thats why consultants who make successful products are an exceptional and special breed.

[mgkimsal]

Interesting angle, as I'm probably the opposite on the 'done' aspect for client work. I mean, at some point, I stop, but usually want to keep iterating on things for the client when they simply don't want to. They don't have the bandwidth for continual iteration - they need something that works for needs X, Y and Z. Once it meets those needs, they're 'done' (and usually 'done' with me too). I struggle to not keep working on something, iterating, etc beyond what the initial specs were.

I'm working with a couple clients where it's an interesting mix - we're iterating the product to meet evolving needs, and discovering some of those needs as we go along, but many projects aren't like that.