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Questions for you to think about to help make your decision: - Will the extra money from consulting reduce any worries you have about money, thereby letting yo

by lsemel 18y ago

Questions for you to think about to help make your decision: - Will the extra money from consulting reduce any worries you have about money, thereby letting you focus on the product more? - Would consulting save you from having to take a full time job, giving you extra time work on the product? - Can you consult on something very similar to your product, own the IP, and use it as a way to learn about your market? - Can you take whatever custom thing you'd be building as a consultant and instead develop a product out of that, and then sell the product to your consulting customer? - Can you outsource part of the consulting, so you're just designing the software, managing the project, and reviewing their work, thereby saving time and drudgery, and letting you mark up the outsourced hours? - Could you meet good people consulting? (i.e. are you consulting for a startup or tech company, as opposed to some company in an unrelated line of business?) - Can you use the consulting gig to learn about tools or technologies you want to use in your own startup? Can you use the consulting to learn about a market that your startup is targeting? - Can you talk to more experienced consultants and get tips on how to charge more and manage clients better?

dangrover 18y ago
Thanks for the ideas! This is exactly what I was looking to hear more about. I'm going to have to think more about those questions. The only thing keeping me from treating the consulting differently is that the product business is something that I can work on when I have time and put on the back-burner if it's really needed and still have it generate passive income. Not so much with clients and deadlines. For the money thing, I've saved up about a year of living expenses, but I don't want to dip into it. Ever. I've heard this gets harder if you're not single, but I have high hopes :).
- lsemel 18y ago
  Don't take tiny bits of work that are due in two days. But if it's a bigger piece of software, you can tell them "It'll be ready in 6 weeks" then you'll have time to do it on your own schedule, assuming you really don't need 6 weeks fulltime to do it. And set up a time limit, and a high rate, for maintenance and bug fixes, so they don't keep calling you six months later to add this or change that.

by lsemel 18y ago

dangrover 18y ago

Thanks for the ideas! This is exactly what I was looking to hear more about. I'm going to have to think more about those questions. The only thing keeping me from treating the consulting differently is that the product business is something that I can work on when I have time and put on the back-burner if it's really needed and still have it generate passive income. Not so much with clients and deadlines. For the money thing, I've saved up about a year of living expenses, but I don't want to dip into it. Ever. I've heard this gets harder if you're not single, but I have high hopes :).

lsemel 18y ago
Don't take tiny bits of work that are due in two days. But if it's a bigger piece of software, you can tell them "It'll be ready in 6 weeks" then you'll have time to do it on your own schedule, assuming you really don't need 6 weeks fulltime to do it. And set up a time limit, and a high rate, for maintenance and bug fixes, so they don't keep calling you six months later to add this or change that.