[eigilsagafos]

Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale.

Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.

[antoniuschan99]

Are you saying to take on the consultancy contracts? I fall into that trap as the consultancy contracts are essentially my day job.

Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(

[hvidgaard]

Until your startup is a full on company with multiple hires, consultancy work is revenue and can be a source of other business ideas that you might hire people for and make into another reliable revenue stream.

I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.

[tone]

Might be a weird question, but what sort of consultancy opportunities do you get? I have worked for a long time in a design and development agency and I (think) I saw very little opportunity or demand for consultancy.

To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.

[djrobstep]

In my experience this stuff is very cliquey - if you’re friends with the guy who is Chief Innovation Officer at some bank, or a heavy hitter at a government department, it’s easy to get yourself lucrative day rate consulting contracts, and much less easy if you don’t. Gotta know the right people and mix in upper middle class circles with people who have power over purse strings.