22
8 Comments

A map for indie living

  1. 2

    Great article ! I remember listening to a talk about something similar from Rob Walling, but didn't quite understand it back then.

  2. 2

    Sure, consulting is a lucrative revenue stream. The real question is:

    How easy/hard is it to find consulting clients?

    With consulting, you're essentially being paid for your advice. How many people would like to pay you for your advice?

    This all sounds good in theory, but not sure if it's implementable in practice.

    I'd broaden this advice and say:

    Find a "stable" revenue stream where you provide a service. It can be consulting, doing some work, anything.

    Then reinvest that money into your own thing (SaaS, etc).

    1. 2

      IME, 99% of people who struggle to find consulting clients are more focused on evangelizing their own ideas and processes than 'who has money to spend that I can help with the skills and experience I have.'

      I started consulting at 23 years old. I had very little industry experience but I had a very strong sense of what expensive problems business owners were trying to solve.

      Often, my value wasn't something I already knew but my ability/comfort doing and reporting my research on the options they had, and helping them evaluate the pros and cons. A handful of clients turned into reliable new clients once they felt like I listened, and helped them make an important decisions.

      I think the #1 reason that people struggle with consulting is that they care more about their opinions being "right" than helping their clients solve problems.

      I agree that reliable revenue can come from lots of places, but I also know that a lot of indiehackers write off consulting because of similar skepticism that's expressed here!

  3. 2

    Solid article. Totally agree that consulting is a super valuable revenue stream for indie hackers. In fact, I remember reading here on IH about someone’s concept of how to reach financial freedom. It was a metaphor about a ladder (if someone knows whose this is, please help me out).

    Essentially the first rung is when you decide to leave gainful employment. Then most people start freelancing, which is the next rung. Then they build that into an agency, then they build that into a product, and then there may have been one or two more rungs. From what I’ve seen personally, and what I’ve seen on IH, this does seem to be the (or at least a) way.

    Also, my favorite part about this article was this:

    How much “time” you have is really about how much energy you have”...

    ...Your headspace is a function of your energy and the kind of work done, not a function of minutes and hours.

    When I’m doing something that enlivens me, I can do it all day long and feel like I just had a day at the park. It almost feels like I have endless hours in the day. I’m bending time. But when I’m doing something takes energy, I’ve only got a couple of truly productive hours in the day — the rest of the time might as well be a wash. That’s why, for me at least, it’s important to think about how much capacity I have for a client/task/etc before I take it on, not how many hours I have for it.

    1. 1

      I think Naval Ravikant speaks about this often.

  4. 2

    I completely agree with what he says about consulting. I wouldn't focus on building a consulting practice in parallel to a startup, but having it as a secondary focus; something you do exclusively for the cash flow can be liberating. In fact, it can help you if you're building a startup because it eases the financial pressure.

    1. 1

      Agreed. But I don't agree with his point about positioning. You're shooting in the dark if you don't craft a tight positioning - just putting something out there and hoping it'll stand out. Without positioning your product is just going to get lost in the crowd.

      1. 1

        Yeah, I agree with you on this. I don't really understand the distinction between a "niche" and a "mode" or a "streak" anyway. Positioning applies to your product not to yourself (unless you're exclusively working on building your own personal brand, in which case, I would be inclined to agree with him), so I don't see the logic behind the "narrative aircover" he's talking about.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments