
Ask HN: How do I start an analytics consulting company? - tixocloud
My background is in business intelligence and analytics. I&#x27;ve worked at both large corporations and small companies.<p>However, I&#x27;m itching to start an analytics consulting company and am wondering how do I begin? First, is analytics consulting even in demand? I have decent programming skills and thought about starting a web development agency but it seems like there&#x27;s a ton of people out there already doing it.<p>Any ideas on how to begin or get started?
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codezero
There is definitely some demand for consulting, but it depends on a lot of
factors.

Caveat: I work at an analytics company, and have interacted with lots of
consultants and agencies.

Agencies are by far more common than individual freelance consultants.

The freelance consultants I've interacted with are hyper focused on some
specific niche like Google Analytics and/or Adwords.

All the niche focused people tend to have niche certifications, like GA or
Omniture. These certifications are good if you only want to target specific
customers/tools, but worse than that, in my experience people with these
certifications refuse to work outside of the box they are trained in.

Freelance people tend to take a different approach of being the jack-of-all-
trades who makes all things better. Improve SEO, improve landing page
conversion, improve retention etc... using lots of tools and being
quantitative.

I do not know how they market themselves to others, but the few I've
interacted with have pretty solid blogs and have built a corpus of what
appears to be knowledge of the field.

To external people looking to hire a freelancer this probably looks pretty
good.

So, depending on which route you want to go, focused on some specific thing
(whether it's the tool, or the vertical), or broader "make everything good"
approach, you'll want to do different things.

Your best bet is to find a friend/colleague who needs this service, and offer
it to them at a very low rate to let you test the waters, and to validate you.
Once you have this, you an start building case studies and showcasing how your
work has helped others.

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tixocloud
For the agencies that you guys engage with, what do you hire them for?

Thanks for your great ideas. I love what you guys are doing at Heap Analytics
and personally, I think it's a genius product. The problems are something I
face on a daily basis with our current analytics setup at work.

~~~
codezero
We don't hire them. They approach us. At the end of the day, they charge their
clients a premium on top of our sticker price. If they bring enough business
in, we'll offer a discount on our sticker price to increase their margins.

As of today, that is about a 15% discount, if you are using us, let me know,
I'm more than happy to work with you on pricing to make sure you and your
clients get the best value. (I'm john@heapanalytics.com) – thanks for the kind
words! Feel free to ping me if you want to chat further.

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rcavezza
Step 1 is to find a client. Talk to the large and small companies you've
worked for, and see if there are any large problems that they haven't been
able to solve.

You only need 1 client to get started, and you can use them to springboard you
to more. The demand doesn't matter if you can't find one client.

Do this first, and then worry about client 2 after you get client 1.

