> Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Neither of these are prereq

> Step 1: Be popular/famous enough that people know your name. Step 2: Be good/accurate enough at opining in ways that make sense. Neither of these are prerequisites for being extremely successful at consulting. My consulting rates are now approximately $10,000/week with a 70% annual utilization rate. I'm not industry famous at all. I also do not maintain a blog or do "content marketing." For a while I had no website, and even now my website isn’t exactly great, it’s what I’d call “minimally good enough” (but then I’m not a web developer :). I started consulting several years ago, and I have literally never gone onsite to a client's location. A significant number of Y Combinator companies have been clients of mine, and virtually all work comes to me via referrals from past clients. I don't typically brag about this, but I'd like to say it because patio11 is an easy target for the "he got there by being industry famous" critique, and I think that would be the wrong thing to take away from his writings. I got to this rate by following his consulting advice as sprinkled throughout his blog and his comments here on Hacker News. I started my rates at approximately $5,000/week, which if I recall correctly tptacek once told me was "criminally low" for the industry :). Here are the two steps I would suggest, in place of yours: 1. Be demonstrably technically competent and capable of presenting your expertise coherently to various audiences, 2. Be willing to raise your rates and willing to ask clients for referrals at the end of every engagement. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the very first time I raised my rates was spontaneously, on the phone with a client. I was asked my rates and thought to myself, “fuck it, let’s see what happens if I ask for 20% more than usual.” I did, there was a moment of silence, then an “okay.” That exchange is the substantive content of essentially every instance I’ve ever raised my rates. There’s not much magic to it aside from being willing to do it. I personally used to be in the same position you're in now, in about 2012, reading patio11's blog and being cynical about it. But I find that framing to be defeatist after having accomplished it myself without either of your steps as a prerequisite. I firmly believe just about anyone who isn't socially tonedeaf and who has a real technical competency can achieve the same if they are determined to do so. As a side note, I personally feel that I owe a lot of my success to patio11, and I’ve told him as much before. His response was essentially to pay it forward, and I hope I can do that a bit with this comment.