How to Find Consulting Clients
I&#x27;ve been able to scale consulting to about 20-35k &#x2F; mo as a single developer.I&#x27;ve gotten all of my clients through word-of-mouth and I&#x27;ve spend zero dollars in marketing. The trick being that I always try to do the best work and communicate instantly with my clients. I.e, if a client e-mails me, or sends me a text, I respond in about one second. They seem to love that.<p>I try to be as honest and forthcoming with each client and I&#x27;ve basically hit a cap now in being able to add any new ones and deliver the experience I want to each client. Scaling is the most difficult part for me right now since all my clients are quite varied. Some of them are web apps, other mobile apps and others just pure cybersecurity. They&#x27;re so vastly different from each other that it&#x27;s a bit difficult to hire someone who can handle the diverse amount of work. Also, I think for the amount of work I do, I should probably have much bigger retainers, so some clients are $1,250 &#x2F; month, but jesus is that hard. It should probably be at least $5,000 &#x2F;month.<p>For me tho, I&#x27;ve learned so much about business and my technical skills have skyrocketed. I honestly feel like I can tackle any problem in the world and it&#x27;s a powerful feeling. I make decisions based on the problem its self and have no loyalty really to a specific technology. I understand why a client may want to use WordPress and why a client may want to use Kubernetes. Some clients want to just do servers using Linux and that&#x27;s okay. I&#x27;ve learned that more basic technology (like bash) can be hugely beneficial to trying to write your own solution. When you&#x27;re under time constraints, you start to have some pretty creative solutions, and not the creative where it breaks later, the creative where it does exactly what it needs to do, but it&#x27;s done in 1 hour instead of 1 month.<p>The best advice I could give is to basically be brutally honest with each client, do the best work that you can and always reply in a timely manner, regardless of what&#x27;s happening in your life. So many consulting companies are slow to reply, or don&#x27;t really care about their clients on a personal level that clients will really love you if you spend time thinking about their business on a personal level, being responsive and just being honest when you&#x27;re overloaded in work.<p>It is a stressful business tho and I&#x27;m in the alpha stages of a product I&#x27;m working on based on the problems I&#x27;ve seen over the years. It&#x27;ll be interesting to move from consulting to a SaaS product. The transition being the consulting provides the funding to be able to work on the SaaS and then hopefully the recurring revenue outpaces consulting eventually and I live a less stressful life!