We do productized DevOps/platform consulting (at reactiveops.com) and I totally concur with the above. We started the company to productize AWS DevOps platform

We do productized DevOps/platform consulting (at reactiveops.com) and I totally concur with the above. We started the company to productize AWS DevOps platform engineering (aka giving your your own mini heroku on your own AWS) which has proven to be very popular. Most companies don't/shouldn't hire a "DevOps Engineer" but do because there isn't a off-the-shelf solution for these things. And, there are economies of scale/network/platform effects in having our entire team building a thing that your one or two person team can't do. Tips if you're going to do this: 1) Get a IP-protected MSA to begin with. You'll need to pay a lawyer a lot of money to get it right because most MSAs are work for hires. Get one that says you own all the IP and can re-use it, and your clients get a perpetual, non-exclusive license - otherwise you'll build a product and then realize later that clients from two years ago actually own the core IP of your multi-million dollar product. Makes due diligence (either fundraising or acquisition) stressful. 2) Build in time to work on product. If you're selling yourself at 40hr/week, there's precious little time to effectively funnel your work back into a cohesive product. Take a page from Thoughtbot and work 4 day weeks, have that 5th day be refactor and integration into your main product day. 3) Test, test, test Your consulting clients are a perfect test bed for you to lean-startup your way into your product. Experiment, experiment, experiment. You'll get great feedback and iterate your way to something that profitably, already, has product-market fit. 4) Have fun! Productized consulting is much more painful than getting a check for a few million dollars and building a team. You grow organically, incrementally, and it can be tough to realize "we're n-months away from MVP but at 1 day a week that's 6 years!". It does require a certain sense of "it'll get there" but it also really encourages you to cut scope ruthlessly, because given the little bit you can work on it, you'll never get there.