
Ask HN: How to move from consulting to product business? - k__
I was employed by many companies, that somehow managed to move from doing consulting to selling a product.<p>I mean, I worked for a few clients as a freelancer, but they basically paid me to build a product &quot;they&quot; wanted sell in the end.<p>The companies I was employed at somehow managed to work for clients, that paid them to build a product that the client wanted to use but didn&#x27;t want to own and sell.<p>Somehow they got paid to build it AND could sell it to other clients afterwards.<p>How does this work?
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davismwfl
What part don't you understand. Client has a need, would like it to be solved
for them. Consulting firm has seen multiple clients every year that have the
same problem and the solution could be applied to each of them. Firm
approaches Client about rights to the code and Client generally gets some
consideration (usually in form of some free hours, as giving hours away is
better than lowering your rate) and consulting firm gets to keep and resell
the product or portions of the code. Support may be what is given away too,
like 2 years free support or something rather than free hours. That is when it
is done on the up and up.

In my own experience I also had taken a Client's idea and said I wouldn't
charge them for the development because I wanted to own the product but that I
would give them a discounted price, allow them to submit requirements and to
be the early "beta" tester.

Sadly, what I have seen far more than the correct way is a Consulting firm
develops a product for Client A and then keeps the code or some portion of it,
and starts reselling it to other clients (or selling hours like they are
developing it -- even worse). Which generally (unless contractually explicit
as allowed) is a major violation and potentially illegal. But I had a lot of
Clients come to me that had this happen to them, both by small boutique
consulting firms and some of the largest firms. Sometimes I think it was sour
grapes from the Client as it didn't really seem to have happened when we would
look. But I lost track of how many times it had occurred in at least in some
form. What was sad is firms wouldn't even try to cover their tracks, since we
did a lot of ecommerce work we could see it literally in the
javascript/html/css a lot of times, literally line for line.

~~~
k__
hm, yes makes sense.

I just had the feeling that the "we saw many clients having that problem" and
the "we gave the clients discounts" didn't happen.

To me it seemed like a "this sucks, fix it please, we will pay you for it, but
we don't want to maintain that software, so keep it."

~~~
davismwfl
Yea, I get that, unless you were in on client negotiations you probably
wouldn't be aware of the details unless someone told you.

And it is always possible they had it built into the contract terms or were
just being shady. In which case I would think they'd try to keep it quiet.

