I was a business owner before I became a tech guy. Living in a country with good rule of law and meeting customers face to face will help you get your first con

I was a business owner before I became a tech guy. Living in a country with good rule of law and meeting customers face to face will help you get your first consulting clients much faster. I recommend being honest about the proposed solution and the time frame required to meet those expectations. Customer usually doesn't know what they need. They ask for a perfect solution. But you gotta show them why the pursuit of chasing perfection is futile for their business, specially in tech where doubling a seemingly simple metric might end up accounting for 10x the engineering cost. Here is an example, some time back I contracted a customer with 10K clients in production delivering 400-500 average RPS. The customer wanted real time stats which is hard to do with that much data as it included many dimensions, I proposed a solution which was 10x cheaper and had a delay of 1 minute. The business owner initially wanted 1 second delay but at the end was happy with my solution. You might not be so confident while talking with the customers but that's ok, just take the problem home, think over it and come back with a solution. As a business owner, I never really wanted a rockstar, I just wanted someone who I can rely upon and you'll be amazed how many failed to deliver just that. You might think that the people with money can always find better folks who can solve their problem faster with a better solution but that's not what happens in practise. I always had all money but still failed to find solutions to my problem. Yea, well that's my own experience :)