Talk to folks you've worked with before. Ask them to describe the value you brought to them. It might surprise you! You think of yourself a certain way; they cast it in a different light, and they're the folks who sign checks.

Expect it to take time. Expect to revisit your positioning every 18 months or so. Expect it to be marketing. You're optimizing for people reaching out with their problems. You can always *do* more than that, but it's a marketing story first and foremost.

We'll get more into this in another thread, but Specific Expensive Problems are way easier to productize and charge more to solve. But "find an expensive problem in your space you know how to solve, then solve it" is the first step.

Sheer naïveté. "I've done this a few times; how hard could it be?" I learned a *lot* on my first few projects. Had I known then how little I really knew, I'd never have gotten off the ground.

The way I got around this early on was with a money-back guarantee. In time I stopped including this, both because it wasn't necessary (I "got good" quickly enough) as well as because it aligned people around the wrong things (cutting vs. optimizing).

Absolutely. You can turn that into "job replacement revenue" within days or weeks; building a SaaS MVP takes... considerably longer before you're "Ramen Profitable."

I'll get more into pricing tomorrow, but a common myth about consulting is that you're YEARS ahead of the client. On a good day you'll be 15 minutes ahead. Worst case, half a sentence. "Thinking deeply about a specific problem for a month" gets you there. I'm being serious.

Take the @awscloud bill. There aren't THAT many services that have runaway bills. There's clearly some structure to it, it's a bounded problem space, and it lent itself to deep thinking without growing faster than I could wrap my head around it.

IAM policies, service discovery problems, query optimizations for specific databases, improving S3 security / querying, etc. all lend themselves to similar types of problems. Those are the things I'd look into; yours are in whatever you enjoy working with.

Why consult at all? Income security. Sounds nuts, right? If you have a diversified client base, contrast how many people would need to fire you in order to wreck your financial picture vs. how many would have to do so in a job.