I got a lot of mileage out of just being able to build and ship things quickly. A surprising number of smart developers aren't actually all that good at buildi

I got a lot of mileage out of just being able to build and ship things quickly. A surprising number of smart developers aren't actually all that good at building software that people can use next week. They get stuck optimizing for every conceivable edge case and refactoring to make sure everything is abstracted out so their CS prof would approve, and go down rabbit holes of tweaking interesting bits of technology. But they never get around to building the thing so that the people who need it can use it to do their job. So after building enough things at enough places for enough people, I started picking up a reputation as a guy who could build things, so when those people started talking to other people at other places who needed things built, my name would naturally come up. Eventually, I put together a collection of artifacts in the form of working SaaS products that I could point to as examples of things I had built from bottom to top, to skip the need to have other people bring my name up. And one of those SaaS products is subtly engineered to spawn customers with needs that are nearly, but not perfectly, met by the product itself. Thus making them natural candidates for short consulting gigs to build them a version of the thing that better suits their needs.