[santiagobasulto]

General consultancy is an extremely crowded space. As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.

My advice would be to differentiate yourself:

- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.

- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.

- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you

[aerhardt]

> Become an expert in 1 thing

I endorse this. I've been doing generalist consulting for about six years, and I love flying solo. I've been successful in landing some big customers and interesting projects, but I'm tired of the inefficiency that comes with being a generalist, so I've decided to specialize vertically.

I had a super-interesting project in executive search in the last couple years, and I've decided to settle around that area: executive search and recruitment firms. Maybe later, as an extension I'll target other B2B, relationship-driven professional service firms tha share a common core of processes.

I've only recently pivoted but I'm already starting to see the fruits. It's commercially efficient. Many potential customers seem happy to open the door and chat. I know where to find them, online and off. And then it's operationally efficient. I'm confident I could jump on a customer project and recognize most of their processes and systems immediately and have a quick impact. I already have a base of IP (documented business procedures, code, etc.) and only intend to grow it in the coming years and even turn it into a "productized service".

I think people refuse to specialize for three main reasons. The first is for lack of a clear thesis. That's fine, you need to explore for a bit. The second is for a fear of lack of opportunities, which is often unfounded. The third is due to psychological reasons related to the image of self. On this last one I can only advise that (a) even in specialization there is way more variety than you think, (b) you can always keep growing as a generalist with side projects and self-directed learning and (c) nothing is ever fixed in stone, everything is in flow - you can always pivot out into other interesting directions.

[skeeter2020]

I used to fear specialization because of a form of commercial or career FOMO. The reality is you instead get spread to thin and are (ironically?) now at risk of being displaced by "good enough" AI solutions. If you are a generalist you still need to be "T-shaped" with a few areas of deeper expertise. Funny enough your expertise could be getting things done-done using all your generalist abilities (ex: able to take initial ideas all the way to a active, viable business).

[altmanaltman]

"Executive search and recruitment firms" is an industry/segment, though, right? I thought this comment was more about specializing in some particular niche tech thing wrt the "just start a open source project guysss" comment

[aerhardt]

Specialization works by vertical or by function. Or you can actually mix them if your TAM remains large enough.

Yes, the parent was referring to technical specialization. But my point is either works. Especially in the context of what OP is trying to do which is "automation" - technically very broad.

[guzfip]

How? This is what I never understood. Every domain expert I’ve ever knowing is because they’ve already I can spend all the time I have reading and toying around in a subject, but until I have real concrete experience to guide me, it’s usually pretty difficult to become an “expert” in anything. I know how to become an advanced hobbyist, but thats never in my life translated to someone being willing to pay me over say, and already established expert

[aerhardt]

I've drifted across projects in different industries (FMCG, investment funds, ad agencies, startups of various sorts) and like I said I had a long project (over two years) for an executive search firm and got to see the ins and outs of how everything works from strategy to technology. I could be drifting to find clients in yet another vertical but I've decided to stay put for at least a few years. So to answer your question, in my particular case: I drifted, stumbled upon something by chance, and then took a conscious decision to stay.

[mekoka]

If you're a dev, one approach to specialization is to align with the tooling associated with common "profit center" processes. Become a Salesforce/Hubspot/Odoo/Shopify developer. If you're not interested in developing, you can specialize in learning one specific ecosystem really well and then teach companies -- typically SMBs -- how to set themselves up and organize their operations around it.

[resonious]

This can help and hurt. E.g. if you run a very successful Shopify plugin, you risk Shopify implementing it natively and wiping you out in one fell swoop.

[em-bee]

common "profit center" processes

how do i find what those are?

i see the point, but i don't find developing for one specific tool very appealing.

[guzfip]

This seems all good and well 10 years ago, but how well does this survive when the actual SMEs can just use LLMs to achieve the same effect? Those are the sort of platforms going all in on that stuff.

[p1esk]

how?

From GP comment: “either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one.”

[assimpleaspossi]

>>I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.

One place hired me thinking I could fix some software they farmed out to India. I was not aware of that when they hired me. Afterwards they said they wanted it fixed in two weeks and fired me when I told them it wasn't possible. The software was in a language I'd never used on hardware I never programmed for.

They hired someone locally who was something of an expert in the area who claimed he could fix it in a month. It took him six months to fix the problems.

Lesson of hiring cheap overseas.

[voakbasda]

And a lesson in the psychology of sunk costs.

They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.

Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.

Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.

[Aurornis]

> As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.

This is why cold outreach is rarely effective. Until you’ve seen it, you don’t realize the volume of incoming freelancing pitches coming from all of the freelancers. It’s getting worse with AI automation, now.

Any real networking at all will set you apart. It has to be more than sending someone a LinkedIn request because that’s what all of the other agencies are doing too. You have to establish yourself as a real and trusted person.

[f3b5]

Re cold outreach: it depends. The bar is abysmally low, and most outreach is just an untargeted spam cannon. Don't be like those people.

If you manage to make the outreach warmer, it can work surprisingly well. I built a tool to identify high-intent leads on LinkedIn which gets me acceptance rates of 60%+ by finding people that comment on relevant content to my niche: https://www.getibex.com

[dustingetz]

+1 about overseas freelancers. And US customer to European freelancer is not the arb it used to be. The California SaaS sector has collapsed in the wake of venture capital rotating into AI-native, saas budgets (salaries) are down, the dollar is down, and remote European salaries are up. Zoom latency across 7-8h timezone difference is workable, the current arb is to hire from further and further east. Unless there is a war disruption such as an attack on the trans Atlantic internet pipes.

[OJFord]

Are you using 'arb' to mean something like cheat or trick, or cost-saving technique?

[dummydummy1234]

Arbitrage I assume

[OJFord]

I know, I just don't see the arbitrage in what's described? If I order online because it's cheaper than the high street, that's not an arbitrage – the arbitrage would include then selling it on the high street afterwards, getting paid to close the gap until it reflects only delivery fees and the value of immediacy.

[le-mark]

I assumed from the context the arb was California salary vs their local salary.

[OJFord]

And to make that an arbitrage you'd need to subcontract someone local to do the job you've taken the California pay for. It doesn't mean 'get a better deal in a non-obvious way/place', it's taking both sides of the trade in different markets.

[altmanaltman]

they might hire them to work on the project and then sell the project themselves hence the arb, or outsourcing basically.

[goldfish_gemma4]

Good point about the project lifecycle. In my experience, open source contributions often get repurposed this way. The key is clear licensing from the start.

[skeeter2020]

+3 for focus / personal and networking.

I don't consult anymore, but for an extended period I did so at a premium rate and as an independent. I remember a hiring manager's boss saying something to me like "I could get 2 or more consultants for the same money" and I replied, " I don't really see myself as competing with those organizations, but if you can get the job done it makes sense to take that path." It was both cocky and true (not sure today-me would say that). The thing I understood well was that differentiating as a skilled individual makes you much harder to displace; there are countless "$TECH programmer with N years of experience in $FOOBAR" while there are very few "$YOU".

[altmanaltman]

2 and 3 are great but 1 will not work great if you're a consultant, unless the 1 thing is broad enough to have actual demand that you can tap into. Finding that 1 thing is also extremely challenging, esp. if you're trying to make it the main revenue play. I can be the world's leading expert on Brainfuck, but that doesn't mean I'll get my bills paid. It's much better to be the "I can call this guy to figure out whatever I need to figure out" person than "this guy only does X well, I'm not sure if i need that, might have to hire the general guy to figure this out first" guy.

[calvinmorrison]

> Become an expert in 1 thing,

Or one vertical, or space. IE: you act as a CTO for companies that are in manufacturing but are a liiitle to small to hire someone.

[gizzlon]

> Become an expert in 1 thing

Any suggestions to what that could be?

I'm a backend developer looking to specialize in something with a clear demand.

Top-of-the-head ideas are things like: Kubernetes, Postgres, Caddy, Self-hosting, Go or Google Cloud

Obviously, one has to try to gauge the demand before spending too much time on it

[InexSquirrel]

My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.

I'm a web developer / designer-lite (amongst other things in previous lives), and have embedded myself as the web-tech guy for an embedded / hardware team. I help provide better customer facing interfaces (through websites, apps, etc) to both end users and manufacturer that the company uses.

I've made small, simple tools that can be packaged up along in a device's flash (it's ~2KB), that allows a user to interrogate the device via serial, capture all the commands + responses, & trivially email them to an engineer. It's designed for troubleshooting devices remote, without needing to ship JLink's or debuggers or what not to clients. It's a very small thing, but it's cool to hear people using it to help troubleshoot with users, in a way that's much simpler than trying to jump on the phone with them & guess what they're seeing on their screen.

I also specifically help make manufacturing test systems which sit closer to a web-app like experience (in terms of usability and visuals), because I've observed that providing end-of-line manufacturing staff with poorly cludged together test systems leads to a bunch of errors which don't need to exist (they're often just quickly thrown together CLIs, which are unpleasant to use and buggy all round - especially for less tech savvy manufacturing staff).

I also happen to really like embedded engineers, they're fun to hang around with - and I get genuine satisfaction out of being able to help them out in areas they haven't specialised in.

[gizzlon]

> My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.

Yeah, I think that is good advice. You just need "an in", somewhere to start.

[icedchai]

Sadly, all of this stuff is a commodity. The market is flooded with such "experts." I'm not saying you aren't better than all of them, you may very well be, it is just very hard to differentiate.

[gizzlon]

I think you're right that it would be hard to differentiate.

I don't think there are many actual experts though, experts as in the people your developers call when they can't figure it out themselves. But the marked is probably small-ish, and there's a large effort to become a real expert.

[raw_anon_1111]

Absolutely none of those are “specialties” that will set you apart

[samiv]

Becoming an expert in one thing also narrows down the potential suitable work tremendously. Also these days nobody wants to pay the expert prices since.. Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)

[samiv]

Sibling commenters seem to be confused.

Usually experts are T shaped. Acquiring expertise always means the time spent is away from learning something else.

The deeper and greater the expertise the more niche the topic usually becomes and the less demand there is.

The world might need X million web developers but how many experts are there in browser technology. Or even experts in that domain something more niche like rendering or rendering niche like Angle and WebGL..you already go this deep and it boils down to a handful of individuals.

Also I didn't say that there would not be demand just that many businesses are not willing to pay for it anymore. Industry layoffs, AI are huge leverages that any potential employer can use to have all the advantage when negotiating compensation.

[bombcar]

The T shape is important - but the base of the T doesn't have to be in tech. If you're an expert in a particular niche and a generalist in a particular business you'll find work.

E.g., a web developer who knows a lot about how lawyers run their business.

[jacknews]

Even if it's true that AI can replace an expert, and I really don't think it is, except in the simplest minds, the AI training companies are aggressively hiring experts...

[le-mark]

Cogent point, expertly applied, thank you.

[59nadir]

> Claude can so the expert stuff with a non-expert (at least in their mind)

Opus is far better at most surface-level tasks than it is at tasks that require deep knowledge and understanding of domains; someone who is a complete generalist (who thus has only surface level knowledge in many, many things) is far more replaceable with LLMs than someone who has deep knowledge in one.

Consider the way LLMs actually are created; they are not created from billions of repos with deep knowledge behind them. The majority of their knowledge comes from a massive amount of surface-level work that's been done and can be sampled from: React starter templates, starter templates + what little customization someone needed, blog-tutorial-level stuff.

[konradha]

This is a strong assertion that's directionally wrong. No matter the economy's state or any AI progress, experts are always searched for.

[arcbyte]

This is not true at all. Not even a sliver of truth.

There must be a word for this style of post where you take your own inadequacies and fears and project them on to others?

[chrisweekly]

Not OP but I feel compelled to reply.

It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth. This (obviously?) implies the risk of targeting a narrower market, and the upside of being more attractive to that smaller population. It's a typical "quality over quantity" tradeoff.

To say there's no "sliver of truth" in pointing that out (let alone w/ an unwarranted jab about projecting fears) is... strange and maybe hypocritical. TLDR your response came across as emotional and passive-aggressive, and confusing.

[swiftcoder]

> It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth

I do not necessarily agree with this as stated. A specialist will have access to many roles within their speciality that are not open to a generalist. The market for generalists without deep expertise is also extremely crowded.