Best ways to find clients online as a software consultancy?
I plan to release a product soon, but it might take time to actually make some profits. I also want to start a software consultancy which will be used as a source of income while the product gets traction (hopefully). What are the best ways of finding clients online?
- I have a website
- Not that much to show off the website yet
- I will go out and ask around my city - meetups, networking, etc
- I actually I have quite a bit of talent in my team to be able to develop anything really
- We want to focus on making MVPs very fast (a few weeks) and on helping people to launch their product on the market
I'm in a similar situation. Trying to run software consultancy from Belarus working on US market. That's why networking isn't an option for me. So online clients is the only acceptable way for me.
Have you managed to get some clients like that?
Actually currently we're working more like individual freelancers. The goal is to find clients who need end-to-end product development (server-side, web and mobile), for example SaaS products. But I have no idea how to find these kind of leads.
May I know who is your ideal customer profile?
I assume that you have a B2B audience.
Therefore, to expand your network you can follow this 1 intense method which I've been following for my business.
#1 AeroLeads + Linkedin: you can use these 2 tools together to find your prospects contact information and it can help you to expand your network for your business.
With available filters in LinkedIn, you can search ideal customer profile and with AeroLeads you can fetch their email address and phone numbers of the prospects in real-time.
In that way, you can keep your proposal to your prospects and can track the response for your product and services.
I have started a couple of consultancies over the years and, for the most part, my attempts at outbound marketing were met with failure. In my experience, most customers that are looking to spend actual money (i.e. nothing less than 10k), are looking to their own networks to get a recommendation. There is substantial risk in laying out 5 or 6-digit project fees, and most want some sense that it's going to succeed.
The approach that has worked the best (for us) is do great work, be willing to compromise, meet a lot of new people, and survive long enough for your network to organically produce leads. It helps a lot to be specialized in some way -- in our case, we build mostly internal-facing dashboards and enterprise management applications with a heavy focus on tight integration with Microsoft products.
That said, I am entirely open to ideas on this one. Growing a consultancy is extremely challenging and there are many ways to do it.
During my consulting years, I landed the vast majority of customers as a result of selling small products on existing market places (mainly Themeforest and CodeCanyon). Landed some pretty big gigs as well that way.
I also know of several consultants who receive a steady flow of customers as the result of releasing open source projects.
I am a Software Consultant and I get most of my work from LinkedIn and Word-Of-Mouth. My website is poor and I currently do not have time to blog so luckily some smart connections and doing good work has kept me going in my year and a half as a freelance Web and Software Development Consultant.
I've had some luck with TopTal. I'm a UX/UI designer.
I actually tried to get into the Toptal network, but I didn't get enough points in the test. Toptal feels more like another job though, I would like to finally start something of my own and see how it goes.
You're not missing out. Toptal is like another job, I'm just using it to subsidize my income until something starts bringing in revenue.
I would say blogging is your best bet. Establish a brand as an expert in your chosen stack or product development, and you will get more high quality leads.
Noted. I was actually thinking of trying to write some posts for medium