I have been consulting full time for about 8 years, mostly with NYC and SV startups. Here's what I use for branding:
- LinkedIn
- Youtube channel
- Udemy courses
I work through an LLC structure but my clients view me as an individual contractor, not an agency. I don't blog or incessantly tweet for exposure.
Like others mentioned, it's all about sales. I have gotten very attuned to identifying warm leads, nurturing them and closing. Because of that, I don't "spray and pray" either. Each month I contact maybe 3-5 outbound leads and on average 2-3 get back to me. From that, I close 1-2 and sub out to junior devs. Average contract value is around $40k.
You have to sell, there's no other way around it. Not only do you have to sell, you cannot be afraid to sell otherwise it will show. I enjoy the selling process, in particular the "close" - that's like hitting a game winning shot. I'm doing a sales call on Tuesday with another SV startup which I have no real bandwidth to take on. I'm doing it mostly to stay sharp and to a degree, for fun. The sales process is actually fun for me. That's how far you have to go with sales if you want to thrive as a consultant.
Carta needs these services to thrive as a private equity marketplace/"book entry" recordkeeper, while anyone building a startup for these services would be better served getting funding and an acqui-hire from Wall Street and other traditional financial services orgs with incredibly deep pockets.
I am an Asian who was definitely discriminated against during the college admission cycle. It really really sucked. Luckily out here in the "real world", a lot of that discrimination flips and I benefit from being an Asian in tech in many ways. I don't feel the least bit guilty about it either.
Two EC2 micros running Ubuntu & Nginx, Mongo DB, AWS Lambda, Cloudfront, S3, API Gateway, NodeJS/Express, React/Redux, and the usual frontend stuff (javascript, bootstrap, SASS, etc), Let's Encrypt for SSL
The platform is a hosting provider where every site runs off a Lambda function. As such, the hosting costs are miniscule ($0 for almost 2500 sites). The only real fees are the EC2 instances.
The best way is to have a developer friend/colleague evaluate the candidate's skill on your behalf. Preferably someone who manages other devs or has had to hire devs previously. There is really no practical way you yourself can make the evaluation.
How I imagine this going is that you have a developer friend who supports what you are doing but who isn’t at a place in her life where she can quit her job to focus on an early-stage startup. So y’all make an arrangement where you pay her to do interviews.
Sounds about right. If the founder was a good friend of mine, I would just screen devs for free. If it was a friend-of-a-friend type situation, I would bill my normal hourly rate (I am a contractor).
This is the only practical solution. You can get a feel for soft-skills/likeability but when it comes to hard-skills, the phrase "it takes one to know one" applies.
There would be if people cared. No one does. The only people not surprised by any of this is Asians. I not only had to be better than my peers to get into Cornell, I had to be MUCH better. So it goes. It could be worse...
To be fair, people are not born with a built-in frame of reference. I used to think I was good at math due to hard work/dedication but I have since met people who worked far harder than me and still were not nearly as good at math. It works the same way with money and pretty much everything. Good-looking people think they are charming, naturally athletic people think they train harder, etc. It's just what it is.
- LinkedIn - Youtube channel - Udemy courses
I work through an LLC structure but my clients view me as an individual contractor, not an agency. I don't blog or incessantly tweet for exposure.
Like others mentioned, it's all about sales. I have gotten very attuned to identifying warm leads, nurturing them and closing. Because of that, I don't "spray and pray" either. Each month I contact maybe 3-5 outbound leads and on average 2-3 get back to me. From that, I close 1-2 and sub out to junior devs. Average contract value is around $40k.
You have to sell, there's no other way around it. Not only do you have to sell, you cannot be afraid to sell otherwise it will show. I enjoy the selling process, in particular the "close" - that's like hitting a game winning shot. I'm doing a sales call on Tuesday with another SV startup which I have no real bandwidth to take on. I'm doing it mostly to stay sharp and to a degree, for fun. The sales process is actually fun for me. That's how far you have to go with sales if you want to thrive as a consultant.