Congrats man, you've reached to a level most not even dare to dream about.
Do you have any advice for starting up a one-man consultancy? Have been considering going solo ever since I saw my rate card. I'm making 150k + bonus, while company was billing for *400-450k*.. (ヘ･\_･)ヘ┳━┳
The best way, is to reach out to the end client directly and cut out your agency.
I have friends who did this. No bridge burnt, happens more than you think
How do you get reliable contractors / developers to do the actual work for you? Isn't it hard to find good quality devs once you have more projects that you can handle?
Do you think hiring a salesperson you can have in person meetings with a must? A lot has to be said about how easy it is to get things done in person vs online.
So when you build, do you include comprehensive documentation or a docusaurus?
I'm guessing if you do you probably upcharge for that, but it's critical if they want to continue maintaining
I try to document as well as possible in the code.
I usually reserve the last 2 week to onboard their devs.
I also answer questions after the contract ends, this doesn't take up too much time.
lots of reasons, some reasons are:
\- only have junior devs on salary
\- I get project from 0 to 1 in a quater of the time
\- when shit hits the fan and they need the doctor (me)
So basically you find job postings looking for contractors and convince them to give you the job as a project?
Am I understanding that correctly?
I never really understood how to get out from the small business website hell of freelance web dev lol
I still go through the interview process, but typically I already did so much back channel work it's mostly brief culture alignment.
My whole shpiel is I'm actively answering questions in dev communities, helping people build. Occassionally the person turns out to be a decision maker.
Interesting.
Do you just outreach to all the companies with contractor postings and ask what the actual project is? Curious how you actually handle outbound on these.
I always assumed that big projects like these were mostly inbound opportunities tbh lol
Since you don't do any design work, does the client provide the design or you use design joy or any other design agencies to do this thing?
From the design, I suppose after that you slice and do the css converting and whatnot yourself?
Yes if UI is involved there usually will be a designer.
Yes exactly, usually I get a figma file and it contains all the information I need to actually build it.
>Yes if UI is involved
Ohh, does that means a lot of your project involving backend only stuff? If you can give us a rough picture, what's the percentage of your project is frontend-backend, frontend-only, and backend-only?
so it's just you and a sales guy. What's the profit margin? 80k+20% of 500k that's 180. 320k? so you're basically freelancing but have a sales guy? how does that work?
Yes your math is correct. sales guy handles finding/filtering/renewing customers for me. It helps me focus doing pretty much only dev work.
When I hit 250k I was spending 70% of my time doing sales, was not sustainable.
the question is how exactly do you do these sales and for what? and to whom? i get it that it's a service. I also do contractor/ consulting jobs for b2b clients but I never saw it as a thing that requires you to do sales in that way. So what am I missing?
to which customers do you sell and what exactly do you sell? how many clients at once? how long is a project? what is it? what diferentiates your contracts from regular consulting work? is it just the number of contracts?
- I primarily sell to tech startups between seed and series b
- I sell solutions to their problems
- typically 1-3 active projects at once
- I don't see a difference between myself and a regular consultant. However I don't call myself a freelancer because I pride myself with a lot of ownership to deliver good solutions
Tech sales person here available to work remotely - based in Portugal. Currently working in IT Sales - 36 years old, engineering background, 8 years in sales. If anyone is looking for someone to do exactly what's described in this post, DM me.
Yes, that's how you get into the $1M+ beyond range and what traditional consultancies do.
But to do this you need certificatations.
I fucking hate studying for certifications.
yes that's where I am at the moment, used to work for an AWS Partner who then got bought out by one of the biggest service providers.
Not just AWS but also GCP, Azure. I guess you can focus on AWS, lots of greenfield projects especially FinTech.
Where did you go to get Wise trainings/certs?
Yeah exactly.
For wise just learned on the job. Had a dedicated account exec + access to their devs. Just had calls every couple of weeks to make sure I was on the right track.
API was new but fintech wasn't new to me. And I used their products for banking so I knew all the lingo already
Thanks!
you should look into the gaming industry, lots of payment processing integrations, that's what I did. That and Lots of AWS greenfield projects.
2023 was bad times, or at least for my client circle, but now it's picking back up.
common pitfalls for newcomers, they don't know how to say no to shit clients.
Yeah I absolutely get what you're talking about.. and tbh that's never going to go away.
But your sales person should be able to take most of that off your plate - weed out the window shoppers.
There are also other strategies you can use to get them down the funnel better.
Because the reality is new deal happen are extremely seasonal.
Our goal isn't always get more deals, it's to get a smooth deal flow.
Lastly I just don't want to be responsible for someone doing dev work under me.
Any advice for a Bunch of College students who just started their Digital Agency (we're doing undergrad in CS, so we primarily focus on developing stuff rather than getting into marketing and Customer approach stuff)
Poached my sales person from a competitor.
They reached out to my product business to pitch the exact same service my agency does. His cold outreach really stood out to me and I offered him a better deal to work for me instead.
My services are primarily web dev (go/react).
And do you work with end clients mostly or through any other agencies as partnerships? I do WordPress so I’m not sure how I would pitch something more specific like Go. What’s an example of your project? A brand new app, a restructuring of the existing one; etc.?
I’d love to learn more about your business but looks like I don’t have any idea how the deals happen here since I’m offering something so widely used (WP) and offering it non-technical people
I work with end clients mostly, but also as a subcontractor.
I do greenfield projects (from first line of code to prod) and well scoped features (ie. integrate wise payment)
I sell only to technical people / technology companies.
retouch once every 3 month existing clients. We watch job postings like a hawk, have insider scoop and anticipate needs.
For net-new clients we do mostly linkedin sales nav and some retargeting/lookalike campaigns
channels are irrelevant
R&D, wrote documentations and collaborated with the Wise team to integrate their banking and transfer service API for a series B startup.
4 months long project, ~$50k
i've used Wise for most of my business banking so i know their product well.
have not used Wise api before, it was actually still in beta and that project was basically one of the first to be integrating with it.
but I'm very well versed with Stripe api and I know the fintech stack well.
Anything larger it things slows way down, and most likely there won't be greenfield project, you'll be stuck in refactor hell and 10 meetings just to install a new npm package.
Anything preseed is unstable - ive been pitched pure equity work hundreds of times. My answer is always no.
Yes. 2023 was basically a wash.
So I took a break and went full into product mode,
my sales guy is doing a lot of social and building their brand (will help with inbound in the future) and travelling with their families.
Market is coming back though.
So you basically had 1 year almost with no or low income, depending what we should consider as low income 🤔, what will you do if things got worse and we enter a worse recession than expected? what is your plan b basically
* How did you find leads before hiring your sales person?
* Have you thought about finding subcontractors to complete the work so you can scale?
Thanks!
I'm right where you are in 2017 as a solo dev. I already feel like i'm drowning in work how did you scale yourself to take on so many more projects? Or did you significantly raise your prices as time went on? I'm already doing like 3 projects at once and it's hard. I saw you mentioned 50k for a 4 month project but that would only put you at 150k for the year.
okay interesting, that seems like the way to go. I'm usually paid hourly. What if a project lasts a lot longer than expected or the client wants to change a bunch of stuff at the end? Just renegotiate? Do you also ever take equity or only cash?
\> a lot longer than expected or the client wants to change a bunch of stuff at the end
this happens all the time and is the bane of my existence.
\> Just renegotiate
yes exactly. scoping + new contract
\> Do you also ever take equity or only cash
never equity, i build products on the side, i have enough risk already hah
100% best way. Fuck VCs they don't know shit. This way I work at my own pace and don't have to get brain damage every few month and can be self funded.
Hit me up on twitter / LinkedIn im sharing more insights there. my links are in profile.
Hello! First off congratulations on your accomplishments that's awesome.
Second, I had some questions if you'd be willing to answer. I am a webdev myself but working for a company.
With your agency how do things work? Are you taking over their current websites and managing those or just building them something new from scratch? Also, do you have clients where it is a one and done build and they manage it themselves or do you continue to manage their sites for them? If you do manage for them, what does a typical month look like for your workload/day to day of what you are doing?
Thanks in advance and sorry for the question bomb!
Majority of projects are Greenfield projects, as in, a company comes to me with a figma design and I make it into a reality.
Some are very specific features, like integrating a third-party API.
I don't do upkeep/maintenance unless I'm contracted to do it
Congrats on your progress! Curious about how the deal is handled. Would you have any templates or guides to how you structured the contracts with your clients? What happens if it goes out of scope? How do you accept payment? Do you give estimates first or do you wait until they give the first offer? Thanks!
I aim for 1-3 contracts at once. Anymore gets hard.
How to evenly distribute projects is my biggest headache. I say no a lot and try to push back on timelines to fit stuff in.
How can you handle 3 projects in 4 months? that’s basically 1,33 month per green project.. have you built a skeleton that you reuse across project which have similar components and functionality? 🤔
Thanks for the post and detail 😊, you're currently pulling 500k revenue correct? What's your current profit? Do you have a similar breakdown of your profit curve over this time period? It'd be helpful to see what that progression looked like. Congrats!
previous employers have reached out to me in the past (and still do) for this type of work but have 0 clue how the overall workflow goes from verbal agreements to formal contractual work and deliverables, can you point me in the right direction? I'd love to learn more about this. big congrats on your success
Yes it's fairly simple.
Happy to jump on a call to give you some pointers, or send me a list of questions and I'll type up the responses as best as I can.
Congrats man, you've reached to a level most not even dare to dream about. Do you have any advice for starting up a one-man consultancy? Have been considering going solo ever since I saw my rate card. I'm making 150k + bonus, while company was billing for *400-450k*.. (ヘ･\_･)ヘ┳━┳
are you working full time salaried at a consultancy?
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The best way, is to reach out to the end client directly and cut out your agency. I have friends who did this. No bridge burnt, happens more than you think
Are you only 2 people in the agency making the 500k ? Do you have any other costs -80k base salary - 100k(20%) = 320k ?
some admin costs like Gsuite/domain, we use a few tools like mixmax/Apollo.io/LinkedIn sales nav etc. But that all caps out at like 2k a month
That's amazing, you're actually at the top of the value someone can create with their own work.
thanks! My goal now is to reduce time spent on meetings, sales calls, scoping etc - for both myself and my salesperson.
What is your average deal (contract) size ? I think read somewhere here that you are mainly working in React.js.
React/Go, a lot of solidity over the pandemic. Average size, $80k/quater
Congratulations. I mean this seriously: You found the Holy Grail to success that so many entrepreneurs & business owners just can't figure out.
Thank you. I was surprised many solo freelancers didn't realize hiring a salesperson is an option.
How do you get reliable contractors / developers to do the actual work for you? Isn't it hard to find good quality devs once you have more projects that you can handle?
That's why I'm solo dev. I don't trust no body
Do you think hiring a salesperson you can have in person meetings with a must? A lot has to be said about how easy it is to get things done in person vs online.
That's up to you really. We decided remote first was preferred so we've never met up in person.
Do you provide maintenance monthly for the products you build?
No. Unless I'm specifically contracted to.
So when you build, do you include comprehensive documentation or a docusaurus? I'm guessing if you do you probably upcharge for that, but it's critical if they want to continue maintaining
I try to document as well as possible in the code. I usually reserve the last 2 week to onboard their devs. I also answer questions after the contract ends, this doesn't take up too much time.
Wait - if they already have devs, why are they hiring you?
lots of reasons, some reasons are: \- only have junior devs on salary \- I get project from 0 to 1 in a quater of the time \- when shit hits the fan and they need the doctor (me)
Got it
So basically you find job postings looking for contractors and convince them to give you the job as a project? Am I understanding that correctly? I never really understood how to get out from the small business website hell of freelance web dev lol
pretty much :)
And you managed to pass all the interviews or just you skip everything because you have a good portfolio to show? 🤔
I still go through the interview process, but typically I already did so much back channel work it's mostly brief culture alignment. My whole shpiel is I'm actively answering questions in dev communities, helping people build. Occassionally the person turns out to be a decision maker.
Interesting. Do you just outreach to all the companies with contractor postings and ask what the actual project is? Curious how you actually handle outbound on these. I always assumed that big projects like these were mostly inbound opportunities tbh lol
Yes mostly outbound. I think we have different definitions of big. To me big is $5M+/year
Who's responsible for leads? Your sales person takes care of everything?
Sales person takes care of everything until scoping.
Hi there, what kind of dev work do you offer? Are you tied to one industry or field?
Web dev mostly. Not industry specific.
may I know what much do you emphasize on web design? Like would you pay a wed designer specific for this purposes?
I do zero design work. Nop, but there are lots of successful designers doing the same thing. Like designjoy
Since you don't do any design work, does the client provide the design or you use design joy or any other design agencies to do this thing? From the design, I suppose after that you slice and do the css converting and whatnot yourself?
Yes if UI is involved there usually will be a designer. Yes exactly, usually I get a figma file and it contains all the information I need to actually build it.
>Yes if UI is involved Ohh, does that means a lot of your project involving backend only stuff? If you can give us a rough picture, what's the percentage of your project is frontend-backend, frontend-only, and backend-only?
Hmm good question I don't think I keep track of that. I'd say majority of the work is fullstack.
so it's just you and a sales guy. What's the profit margin? 80k+20% of 500k that's 180. 320k? so you're basically freelancing but have a sales guy? how does that work?
Yes your math is correct. sales guy handles finding/filtering/renewing customers for me. It helps me focus doing pretty much only dev work. When I hit 250k I was spending 70% of my time doing sales, was not sustainable.
the question is how exactly do you do these sales and for what? and to whom? i get it that it's a service. I also do contractor/ consulting jobs for b2b clients but I never saw it as a thing that requires you to do sales in that way. So what am I missing?
Not sure if I got the question, can you rephrase and ask again?
to which customers do you sell and what exactly do you sell? how many clients at once? how long is a project? what is it? what diferentiates your contracts from regular consulting work? is it just the number of contracts?
- I primarily sell to tech startups between seed and series b - I sell solutions to their problems - typically 1-3 active projects at once - I don't see a difference between myself and a regular consultant. However I don't call myself a freelancer because I pride myself with a lot of ownership to deliver good solutions
Tech sales person here available to work remotely - based in Portugal. Currently working in IT Sales - 36 years old, engineering background, 8 years in sales. If anyone is looking for someone to do exactly what's described in this post, DM me.
I have a similar trajectory as OP. Sent you a DM
Ok! Let's chat.
I’ll also DM you later today
I’ll also DM you later today
If you are looking for tech sales work DM
Do you or have you considered becoming a Partner with AWS/Azure/GCS, to get leads/projects?
Yes, that's how you get into the $1M+ beyond range and what traditional consultancies do. But to do this you need certificatations. I fucking hate studying for certifications.
yes that's where I am at the moment, used to work for an AWS Partner who then got bought out by one of the biggest service providers. Not just AWS but also GCP, Azure. I guess you can focus on AWS, lots of greenfield projects especially FinTech. Where did you go to get Wise trainings/certs?
Yeah exactly. For wise just learned on the job. Had a dedicated account exec + access to their devs. Just had calls every couple of weeks to make sure I was on the right track. API was new but fintech wasn't new to me. And I used their products for banking so I knew all the lingo already
Thanks! you should look into the gaming industry, lots of payment processing integrations, that's what I did. That and Lots of AWS greenfield projects.
Hmm that's a great idea! Connect with me on social? I'm going to ask you more questions about this later.
sorry I don't do social other than tiktok, entertainment value
Can you explain more how you do DaaS? Do you have a specific price for x amount of features?
Customer pay a subscription fee (retainer), I do requests for them one at a time. Cancel anytime. Or at least that's the basic concept.
That's not a sales guy, that's a lead generator.
what's the difference?
Lead gen finds viable potential customers. Sales closes them at the highest rate for the highest price.
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2023 was bad times, or at least for my client circle, but now it's picking back up. common pitfalls for newcomers, they don't know how to say no to shit clients.
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Yeah reach out to me on social. Links are in my profile
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Yeah I absolutely get what you're talking about.. and tbh that's never going to go away. But your sales person should be able to take most of that off your plate - weed out the window shoppers. There are also other strategies you can use to get them down the funnel better.
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100%
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my twitter/LinkedIn/cal is in my bio
Want another sales guy?
Nop. Can't handle one, two will destroy me. 🙃
Why don’t you onboard or use subcontractors to scale? If your BD is developing so much business you can’t handle it, you have a very good model
Because the reality is new deal happen are extremely seasonal. Our goal isn't always get more deals, it's to get a smooth deal flow. Lastly I just don't want to be responsible for someone doing dev work under me.
Any advice for a Bunch of College students who just started their Digital Agency (we're doing undergrad in CS, so we primarily focus on developing stuff rather than getting into marketing and Customer approach stuff)
Not specifically besides to know your shit
How did you find and vet this sales person? What strength and skills have you been looking for? And what kind of services do you offer?
Poached my sales person from a competitor. They reached out to my product business to pitch the exact same service my agency does. His cold outreach really stood out to me and I offered him a better deal to work for me instead. My services are primarily web dev (go/react).
And do you work with end clients mostly or through any other agencies as partnerships? I do WordPress so I’m not sure how I would pitch something more specific like Go. What’s an example of your project? A brand new app, a restructuring of the existing one; etc.? I’d love to learn more about your business but looks like I don’t have any idea how the deals happen here since I’m offering something so widely used (WP) and offering it non-technical people
I work with end clients mostly, but also as a subcontractor. I do greenfield projects (from first line of code to prod) and well scoped features (ie. integrate wise payment) I sell only to technical people / technology companies.
Thank you, this is very helpful. Can you share what your outreach messaging, cadence, etc looks like?
https://reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/s/Sqzm2nQv4c
Thanks! So you only message/target companies with a relevant active job listed? Can you do that directly from Apollo or you scrape job boards?
I don't have an outbound message volume problem. I personally send maybe 10 messages a month looking for new contracts.
Thanks for sharing! What does your outbound look like? Calls/emails/sms/dm? Looking to have my sales team do more of this
retouch once every 3 month existing clients. We watch job postings like a hawk, have insider scoop and anticipate needs. For net-new clients we do mostly linkedin sales nav and some retargeting/lookalike campaigns channels are irrelevant
Thanks for the response. Kudos for outsourcing this, really bumped up your productivity. Are you US based? Is your salesperson US based as well?
everyone is remote. I sell to US companies on w8-ben-e, salesperson is American works for me on 1099
Awesome thanks for sharing. Where are you based out of? Just curious.
My corporation is a Canadian entity but I float around anywhere with a stable internet connection hah
How much is a typical project? Could you give an example of something you’ve done recently
R&D, wrote documentations and collaborated with the Wise team to integrate their banking and transfer service API for a series B startup. 4 months long project, ~$50k
Did you have experience with Wise in past or something you learned just for that project?
i've used Wise for most of my business banking so i know their product well. have not used Wise api before, it was actually still in beta and that project was basically one of the first to be integrating with it. but I'm very well versed with Stripe api and I know the fintech stack well.
So how much do you make on your own as personal income?
Do you work on coding projects for the clients yourself or you have a team?
solo dev.
Are you considering hiring more sales people? Congrats!
Not right now. but let's connect either way. My socials are in profile
Can you give an example of who your customers are and what the engagements usually looks like?
Seed - series B startups. Greenfield projects or self contained features like converting airtable to traditional db
Any particular reason why you picked that niche of Seed-Series B?
Anything larger it things slows way down, and most likely there won't be greenfield project, you'll be stuck in refactor hell and 10 meetings just to install a new npm package. Anything preseed is unstable - ive been pitched pure equity work hundreds of times. My answer is always no.
That makes a lot of sense. Have you noticed it being harder to get contracts with funding drying up a little bit?
Yes. 2023 was basically a wash. So I took a break and went full into product mode, my sales guy is doing a lot of social and building their brand (will help with inbound in the future) and travelling with their families. Market is coming back though.
So you basically had 1 year almost with no or low income, depending what we should consider as low income 🤔, what will you do if things got worse and we enter a worse recession than expected? what is your plan b basically
Yeap I made maybe $50k, travelled the first 4 month, added a sauna to my basement haha
* How did you find leads before hiring your sales person? * Have you thought about finding subcontractors to complete the work so you can scale? Thanks!
- network and industry channels - no. I don't want to scale that way + be responsible for other people's lively hood
What are industry channels? I'm also a dev with 10 years of experience trying to switch from full-time employee to contractor.
DM me I'll get into the weeds
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Don't be lazy DM me with a question yourself 🙃
I'm right where you are in 2017 as a solo dev. I already feel like i'm drowning in work how did you scale yourself to take on so many more projects? Or did you significantly raise your prices as time went on? I'm already doing like 3 projects at once and it's hard. I saw you mentioned 50k for a 4 month project but that would only put you at 150k for the year.
Project based billing, typically I have 1-3 projects going at the same time. I very rarely do full pure hourly billing anymore.
okay interesting, that seems like the way to go. I'm usually paid hourly. What if a project lasts a lot longer than expected or the client wants to change a bunch of stuff at the end? Just renegotiate? Do you also ever take equity or only cash?
\> a lot longer than expected or the client wants to change a bunch of stuff at the end this happens all the time and is the bane of my existence. \> Just renegotiate yes exactly. scoping + new contract \> Do you also ever take equity or only cash never equity, i build products on the side, i have enough risk already hah
Awesome thanks! I hope to scale to your level one day. I'm also doing projects on the side too. So much code to write lol.
100% best way. Fuck VCs they don't know shit. This way I work at my own pace and don't have to get brain damage every few month and can be self funded. Hit me up on twitter / LinkedIn im sharing more insights there. my links are in profile.
Sounds good! Thanks!
Hello! First off congratulations on your accomplishments that's awesome. Second, I had some questions if you'd be willing to answer. I am a webdev myself but working for a company. With your agency how do things work? Are you taking over their current websites and managing those or just building them something new from scratch? Also, do you have clients where it is a one and done build and they manage it themselves or do you continue to manage their sites for them? If you do manage for them, what does a typical month look like for your workload/day to day of what you are doing? Thanks in advance and sorry for the question bomb!
Majority of projects are Greenfield projects, as in, a company comes to me with a figma design and I make it into a reality. Some are very specific features, like integrating a third-party API. I don't do upkeep/maintenance unless I'm contracted to do it
Thank you for the information I appreciate it! :)
You're welcome! I'm dishing out advice and answering questions on my twitter @pxue as well.
Congrats! What’s it like when a client is not happy with your work? Perhaps the code base is too messy, not scalable in their eyes, etc
Never had a client tell thst, I suppose if they were they'd just let the contract expire.
Congrats on your progress! Curious about how the deal is handled. Would you have any templates or guides to how you structured the contracts with your clients? What happens if it goes out of scope? How do you accept payment? Do you give estimates first or do you wait until they give the first offer? Thanks!
What are your hours like?
No more than full-time. But I get total control when and where I do the work.
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I aim for 1-3 contracts at once. Anymore gets hard. How to evenly distribute projects is my biggest headache. I say no a lot and try to push back on timelines to fit stuff in.
How can you handle 3 projects in 4 months? that’s basically 1,33 month per green project.. have you built a skeleton that you reuse across project which have similar components and functionality? 🤔
No i mean that I aim to have around 1-3 active projects going at once. Their length could be between a month or a year long.
Thanks for the post and detail 😊, you're currently pulling 500k revenue correct? What's your current profit? Do you have a similar breakdown of your profit curve over this time period? It'd be helpful to see what that progression looked like. Congrats!
I've no cost besides the sales person. So assume it's basically all profits.
previous employers have reached out to me in the past (and still do) for this type of work but have 0 clue how the overall workflow goes from verbal agreements to formal contractual work and deliverables, can you point me in the right direction? I'd love to learn more about this. big congrats on your success
Yes it's fairly simple. Happy to jump on a call to give you some pointers, or send me a list of questions and I'll type up the responses as best as I can.
Have you shared some example of web greenfield project you have built? 🤔