

Ask HN: Becoming an independent technical consultant - itgoon

I&#x27;m trying to work out a different income stream for myself. I&#x27;m getting older, and would really like something more appropriate for me as I&#x27;m dragged kicking and screaming into old age (I&#x27;m 46 - so, not too late to be doing this).<p>I mostly work for large organizations, but I don&#x27;t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.<p>Over the years, I&#x27;ve been contracted by small and medium sized companies as a technical consultant. They are usually friends of friends, or someone I worked with in the past. Including time for paperwork, they typically last about two weeks. It pays well, so it doesn&#x27;t need to be constant, just steady. As it is, this comes up about once a year.<p>Feedback I&#x27;ve received has revealed some advantages:<p>- one point of contact, they always talk to the same person
 - low to no sales pressure, since I don&#x27;t have a product line to push
 - much less expensive than a full consulting firm, because I have little overhead
 - deliver solutions appropriate to the business. No tech for the sake of tech.<p>I&#x27;m getting ready to do the meetups, technical and business. Before I begin stumbling around, could I get some ideas of what small and medium, preferably technical, businesses might be looking for? What are other benefits? What&#x27;s a good approach for initiating conversations - the &quot;elevator pitch&quot;? Are there other places I could look?<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I ran a small hosting company for a few years, but got out when everything started consolidating. I&#x27;m comfortable with the paperwork, taxes, etc. I&#x27;m terrible at marketing, and that&#x27;s where I&#x27;d like your help.<p>I don&#x27;t want this to be about me. I think there are others that would be interested.<p>Thank you.
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joeax
I've worked and talked with various dev/IT consultants over the years, and the
advice I've gotten boils down to this: specialize in a niche or product. Don't
just be a web development consultant, for example. Be a web development
consultant with a focus on X.

That X can be anything. Things like Wordpress or Joomla, or product companies
like SAP, MS CRM, verticals like finance/banking or energy, or even your own
open source project on GitHub.

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itgoon
That makes sense, thank you.

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caseysoftware
The same question came up just a little while ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836376)

Check out those threads and start digging. Patio11 is a good person to read up
on.

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itgoon
I missed that one - thanks!

