Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?

I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.

Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.

Still working with them 6 years later.

I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!

Be nice on the internet, I guess.

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

How? I had a set of letterhead/envelopes/business cards printed up. I had already been "hanging-out" in the local electronics surplus stores, where they also sold used computer parts and the like. Stacked around the cash registers in these stores at that time were business cards. Various specialists. So I kept my own maintained stack of cards in my two main goto-stores, and I was friends with the register clerks, and had them handing out my cards on occasions when somebody came in the store and wanted help with "something". After 8 months of doing this, and being flat-broke, the day before Christmas, somebody telephoned off of my business card, and asked if I could do something. He brought some sample stuff, and I accepted a $200-per week retainer from him (I was really good at budgeting and that was what I had been getting for UEI until it ended). He had brought his checkbook with him, and wrote me a check. That started my personal word-of-mouth network and kept me going for a few decades.

I'm doing this right now -- AI automation for small businesses, started on Upwork about two months ago. The thing that actually moved the needle was writing proposals that were basically free mini consultations. Someone posts about needing their spreadsheet workflow automated, I'd write back describing their exact problem back to them and how I'd wire it up with n8n, what the timeline looks like, what usually goes wrong. No "I have 10 years of experience" stuff.

Took about 6 weeks to get 5 reviews. Before that I was competing on rate against people charging $15/hr and it was miserable. After the reviews landed I bumped from $70 to $95 and nobody pushed back. The reviews changed the entire dynamic of the conversation.

Been at this 10 years. My top tip is if you’re doing cold outreach, kickstart the value exchange by giving something first without asking for anything in return.

A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.

It doesn’t need to be a big give - an actionable plan for a small system improvement they can give to someone internal to implement, for example, is fine.

Another tip is to highlight the problem with a loom video/recording of some sort. That way they’ve seen and heard you too. This builds instant trust and a feeling of knowing the person behind the business straight away.

Good luck!

I do freelance consulting alongside building my own product.

My first clients came through a friend who connected me with people that needed someone to maintain a mobile app and its backoffice. Thats it. No cold outreach, no fancy strategy, just someone who knew what I could do and made the intro. I think most engineers underestimate how much work comes from just telling people around you what you do.

For getting more visibility I started writing about what I'm building on LinkedIn, sharing technical decisions, things I got wrong. People reach out from that. Not a flood but enough

One thing I'd warn about: consulting can eat your whole schedule if you let it. I had to put hard boundaries around my consulting hours because my own product was getting zero attention. Now I treat consulting as the thing that pays the bills while I build the thing I actually care about. If you dont set that boundary early you wake up in 2 years running a consultancy you never wanted.

My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.

Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.

On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.

It's bedtime in Melbourne, but I write what would be fair to call a well-known tech blog, and very publicly started a consultancy about 1.5 years ago. Pretty much in the same niche you're in. We made enough money to pay two people full -time wages in the first year and I've cracked $1K per hour on some engagements (not many, and each one was <20 hours).

Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.

Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.

Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.

Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.

Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)

I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.

I did similar stuff for many years (and sometimes still do). By far the most effective was going and meeting people in adjacent or similar fields and making sure they knew about me.

My favourite was helping scientists - not the highest paying gigs, but the most interesting work and sometimes it led to great ongoing relationships as their go to tech person.

I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting, and after that, they go into paid discovery at a lower rate than your full rate, out of which they get a technical persons documentation of the problem to solve. This approach definitely worked the best for me in the long run.

The gist is to mine your network, and the best is when you can have contacts as champions in your clients’ companies. Here are a few good readings;

- [20 Lessons for Attracting, Signing, and Retaining Great Clients](https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/service-business)([archive](https://archive.is/B0bWG))

- [How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor](https://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant/) ([archive](https://archive.is/iun16))

- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...) ([archive](https://archive.is/STvcv))

- [The Strategic Independent](https://tomcritchlow.com/strategy/) ([archive](https://archive.is/O5OKC))

- [A retiring consultant’s advice on consultants](https://www.economist.com/business/2023/08/17/a-retiring-con...) ([archive](https://archive.is/Slqwj))

- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients)([archive](https://archive.ph/kBPDL))

I started freelancing over 10 years ago, and I got my first freelance project through an acquaintance from my former dorm in Copenhagen. After that I got several different freelance jobs through recruiters on LinkedIn. But it was a different time, as the cliché goes. One thing to know about highly paid freelance positions is that they are extremely cyclical. These are positions that mainly exist because the market is booming and screaming for labor, and when that's not the case, companies will much, much prefer to have permanent employees.

In the time before COVID and up until its end, the tech market was booming, but when the economic stimulus ended and interest rates rose, the tech market shrank and the freelance market in Berlin/Germany (and probably Denmark too) has never really recovered. The positions simply aren't there, only very few that many fight over. The great thing about being a freelancer before was that you were almost treated like a rock star, recruiters contacted you all the time, and you could pick and choose.

If you don't have a large network, you can try signing up with different recruiters and see what they have to offer. You might be lucky if you live in regions with less competition and where clients are looking for someone local to work on-site. Getting hired these days also requires that you have (substantial) experience and can show some projects.

(By the way, I’m looking for a permanent position—preferably in Copenhagen—as the bank requires this to approve my loan application. Here is my resume just in case: https://lasse.sometechblog.com/)

I worked on an open source application, and some people wanted to use parts of it as a library in their commercial applications. So I started a consultancy due to that demand. I still had a regular job at the same time though, so there was never a need to gather enough clients to make a living out of the consultancy job.

Things I learned:

- Get an accountant ASAP, even if the income is small. Just the peace of mind that my taxes were being filed correctly was worth the cost.

- You don't need a perfect solution from the start, you are working with your client towards something they can use.

- You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.

- Almost all clients wanted me to either come work for them or sell all (rights of) my work to them. This is understandable from their side, but if you want to stay independent you need to set some boundaries.

The best is proof of work. If you don't have any, build something and show that off. Even listing out the companies you have worked for will be good. Cold email could work if its not completely "cold", i.e, find companies/people who are in the space/industry where you have worked so that they can see you have solved a similar problem before. 10+ years of software engineering is quite valuable, you just have to present yourself in a way where the value can be seen.

Also, never, ever work for free. One, your time is worth more than you think. Second, it makes you sound a bit less serious and less valuable and you will attract clients that are not fun to work with. Not worth your time at all. The only people who MAYBE should be working for free are students who are in high school.

I have been freelancing on and off on the side for the past 8 years and this year pulled the plug and going full time on it and tbh I am now oversubscribed. So, there's definitely a need for it.

My first few clients (8 years ago) were through posting on reddit (/r/forhire) and then also on the monthly HN freelancer thread (was shocked they stopped doing that, I have gotten 2 solid clients from those!).

I get basically all my contract work through folks I've worked with in the past. With a little luck, your network slowly diffuses across the industry, and when they need a heavy-hitter, they know who to call

I hangout on a few Slack groups (Elixir, Ruby, etc), got quite a few projects this way as the founders were looking for experienced consultants.

It also helps if you could show either/both:

* a portfolio / clients you've worked with

* open source / "street-cred"

When I was looking for projects I always attach my Github profile (https://github.com/fredwu) to show my open source contributions, and also the SaaS products I've built myself (https://wuit.com/), and if clients are looking for C-level / strategic-level help, I also attach my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/), these help build up your reputation and stand out amongst many freelancers also looking for projects.

I just had a very quick glance at your site - there seems to be a lot of text, mostly focused on what you can offer. But what's missing is... who are you? What have you done?

So unlike some folks, I’m still very much reliant on $DAYJOB for the majority of my income. But I managed to carve out a niche in an unexpected place.

OS/2 consulting

It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.

I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.

I am still in the phase of: Just released it, and fighting hard to make it working.

But mainly, a lot of things accumulated. I am 40 now, with two kids, the second - 6 months old. When she is 20, I will probably need to use daipers for elderly people. And she needs proper education.

AI is changing the world, and being a software developer might not be a safe long-term position anymore.

With my, almost 20 years of professional experience, as a software developer contractor, seeing a lot of project, I just felt confident enough to try. Let's see how it will go :)

I will you all the best in your journey :)

In your case, bike or drive around and talk to SMEs in your city. Have friends refer you to their contacts, so it's a warm intro. Build software for free, and maintain it on an annual maintenance contract basis. "Value-price" each AMC. Initially, be fine with "leaving money on the table". Within two to three deals you will figure out a mutually profitable pricing strategy.

Identify who your buyer is. It’s probably not a technical person (and thus HN isn’t a great place to advertise).

Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)

For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.

Just my $0.02 of course, circumstances may vary

i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.

If you'd like visibility, I pay experienced developers a small fee to write educational articles on software infrastructure. While you cannot write about your own projects, your byline in the article is a good place to say that you're looking for work (employment or contract).

https://theconsensus.dev/contribute.html

I made monkeys.zip - a project that was completely useless and reflects my interests and skills, and people have reached out with creative projects since

First: Flew to California on whim after meeting some other devs in an IRC chat. Second: I kid you not, playing pool in a bar.

I used to help for free in a forum of an open source booking engine, a British startup wanted to migrate into this software and heavily customize it for their own needs, they hired me and ended up working for them for 6 years

3 quick (and true) stories that helped me when I was in a similar situation (started my own thing in 2024). Currently have 6 clients and 9 employees (which wasn’t the plan!)

1. Embrace the bizarre. You need your first client, not a repeatable go to market motion. Once you have a client, you can begin to work on getting clients and figuring out what type of work you want to do longer-term. My first client was a friend who owned a business, knew enough about technology to scratch the surface and was willing to pay $5k for me to coach him. He had to write all the code and I agreed to monthly coaching until he was able to get his site in production. Terrible economics but earned real money and that’s the point of your first client - it legitimizes you. 2. Tell true stories. Did you meet with a prospect yesterday? It’s much more compelling to open your conversation about something real that happened instead of words on a page. Your website looks like every other AI consulting website. No shade, mine does too. Website is unlikely to be a major source of business. Don’t lie to yourself that adding features to your site is investing in your business growth until you are getting new leads from it. 3. The question you should be asking is how do I get my 2nd, 3rd and 4th clients because otherwise you have just traded being an employee with benefits for ‘freedom’ and utter dependence on your single client. Again, embrace all the strategies. My 2nd client came from responding to an RFP - something I’d never done in my career. 3rd client came from a referral from 2nd client. 4th client came from a friend who knew I did tech and need some help to bring a project to life. None of it makes sense in hindsight, but the point is that you learn by doing. Every client teaches you something about the type of business you want to become.

Bonus tip: read books. Not because they have the formula that you will use, but because they have the best ideas written down. Some combination of those ideas is likely your path to success. Reading books has far greater return than shorter forms (social media and dare I say HN comments). Bizarrely, the most impactful book I read is one called The Prosperous Coach which is about an entirely different business system than anything I do.

*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.

People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.

By having a reasonably successful open source project while in university. Someone reached out with work in a relevant area. I suppose that gate is mostly shut off these days with the volume of vibe-coded crap (or even non-crap) and uptick of clearly fraudulent stars on GitHub.

I was a Java programmer and administered a fairly big community website written in Drupal as a side gig, then applied to a news company that used Drupal, out of curiosity.

Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.

Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.

Hello. I am also doing this and have more leads / opportunities/ projects than I can handle at the moment. All from my network.

Happy to collaborate / share. Please leave links to your cool projects / GitHub / portfolio etc and I'll reach out if it feels like a possible match. Thank you and best of luck.

Had been consulting for equity with one startup out of an accelerator, so it was natural to go paid once I went out on my own. For the next few clients, approached investors I knew from that and other startups, who referred me to portfolio companies who needed me. I wish I'd read Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting at the beginning though, I would have avoided many mistakes (like day-rate billing).

Is anyone in this space nervous that companies will spend their infrastructure or software engineering budget on AI 'agents' like Claude en lieu of consulting dollars?

If you aren't afraid of this, are you doing anything different from a marketing or even daily work perspective?

Whats your actual tech experience?

Most enterprises that need consultants are using Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Dynamics, etc. If a company has an engineering department to build and run internal software, they very rarely need a consultant. And if they don't, they are very unlikely to higher a consultant to build it custom. They'd want "out of the box" because they think (often incorrectly these days), it will be easier to maintain.

This was a long time ago but I got an article published in Byte Magazine back when Byte mattered. Got a phone call a couple of weeks after it was published.

Open source helped me more than cold outreach. Shipping something small and useful gave potential clients something concrete to evaluate instead of just a resume. The conversations that followed were much warmer.

Basically, I reached out to existing relationships. A few had needs I could fill. A few referred me to others.

Recommendations from past workplaces and networking. Honestly never heard of anyone else being hired as a solo contributor outside those channels.

Rely on your network. This idea you’re going to email someone you never met and they’re going to agree to wire you 10k is as fanciful as it sounds.

As others have mentioned, it’s a super crowded space and based on my experience and metrics, in the last year has become 4-5x more crowded.

Your offer of 10 free hours sounds great and if you’ve read Alex hormozis books you’re thinking you’re on the right path. 10 hours isn’t free though. It’s 10 hours of my time to support someone who probably has no idea what they’re doing (business wise, I’m sure technically you have skill but that’s not enough.)

Once you’ve got some case studies from people you know. Figure out where the money is and where it’s going. Then give it away for free as lead magnets with value. Charge to do hands on implementation and get your foot in the door there. Make it blatantly obvious you have skills wider than just implementing your lead magnet and look for legitimate opportunities to help their business.

Once you’re at this stage, you can start emailing warm leads.

You need to be likeable, extremely reliable, technical, up to date and be able to deliver value to clients that can afford you.

Lastly, this is an incredibly difficult space to be in. If you don’t have a network that you can rely on to generate leads, you’re sunk. Change tact and focus on the job market. The good thing is, you probably do have a network, you’ve just never thought of them like that before.

Absolutely easiest way is to find some consultant work sales agency that takes a commission when they manage to sell you somewhere. At least where I live there are multiple options, just list yourself (or your company) there.

Also you don't have to do the sales work yourself and they find suitable customers for you etc, it's totally worth the price especially if you are just starting

I got most of my clients from Reddit and Discord.

People look for freelancers, I say hello.

One guy asked for proof of prior work. I said, demo will be online Wednesday, there will be your proof. Hahaha

It works if you can work it.

As a consultant I got my first project through a former colleague who referred me to the organization looking for a consultant.

It's not easy to find consultations out of the blue, I have gotten one by apply to a public call looking for a consultant that I am in the being interviewed process now, but referrals are far more easier.

1. SEO and Linkedin https://www.amazingcto.com - best was connecting Google Search Console via MCP to Claude Code CLI for optimizations of landing pages.

2. Semrush has a free tier that works for me for SEO.

3. GEO (AI optimizations), AIs return me when people ask about "CTO Coach"

I went to a conference and talked to all the vendors about their products.

Old employers have always been the mainstay of my consulting work, former colleagues my main leads.

Well, I started a long time ago: I had written several books and readers occasionally contacted me for doing gig work.

Back in the day, being a teenager and hanging out on freelancing forums was enough.

Not really a consultancy story, as we were an aspiring start-up. We had created a homepage and a LinkedIn page for our company, we wrote a business plan and talked to VCs and business angels and other start-ups to learn and raise funds - completely in vain for a year.

Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.

It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.

Network, relationships, people you know.

By the grace of god

Can you publish a very short and concise case study of how you've helped one of your clients? Would that client be down to reference you to their friends? If not, can you go the extra mile with them so they just gush about you to others?