How do I test for product-market fit of my consulting services?
Hi, I'm going to start out with the TLDR and get straight to the point, but I'll add some background to my request in the bottom.
TLDR
I recently decided that my goal for this year is to quit my job and become an independent consultant. I already decided on how I want to position myself and two service offerings that I want to test for traction. Basically, I want to see if I can get work before I start eating my savings.
I have the very not-so-unique problem that I am currently still employed, and I am not allowed to have "other paid employment" per my contract. Setting up a website, where I advertise my new service offerings could easily be seen as a breach of contract.
How can I test the waters as an independent consultant without being in breach of contract, without quitting?
I've never been responsible for customer acquisition before, and with two small kids, I'm hesitant to
Some background
I am currently employed as a software consultant at a major software and IT consultancy in my country. I am getting pretty dissatisfied with my job and I wish to do something else.
I've been developing software professionally for 4 years, 2.5 of which I've been using mathematical modelling to make production planning software for company with a large portfolio of power plants.
It's not uncommon that small to mid-sized companies have people that manually create these production plans, in excel or similar, relying on more or less nothing but experience.
I decided to use my masters degree (in Operations Research) along with my skills as a software consultant to deliver specialized software to a market I have actual domain expertise in.
My skill set is pretty straight forward:
- Back-end development (C#, ASP.NET, SQL)
- Front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript / typescript)
- Azure Cloud (For hosting, CI/CD)
- Mathematical modelling (mathematical optimization, a bit of statistics)
- Production planning / facility scheduling algorithms
- Simulation
So basically, I can make a web-based UI for dealing with anything that I can translate into a mathematical optimization problem. I chose production planning problems as a specialty, because they are where I have the most experience and the ones I like the most.
What you could do is mark yourself as available for freelance work on LinkedIn. I get a lot of recruiters writing to me that way. That isn’t work that I, or I suspect you, would find very rewarding. Just going somewhere, sitting on-site 5 days a week. Like being an employee, only with less influence.
However, if you got a few offers of jobs like that, you could quit your job safely and move to doing that for a month or two.
The important thing being, that while you’re doing that, you won’t be bound by any of the constraints of employment. You can set up your website, talk to prospective clients of the business you actually want to run, etc.
And if your business takes longer to take off than you expect, at least you’re getting paid by the “day job” (or “day contract” in this case).
I like the way you think, but I can't do that without quitting, as renting myself out as a freelancer would be in breach of contract.
I am no expert, so this is definitely not legal advice, but I can't imagine that marking yourself as available on LinkedIn, and have a few chats with freelance recruiters on LinkedIn, would count as breach of contract. You'd obviously do the freelance work after the end of your notice period, so e.g. you'd be chatting now and if you land a contract, you'd offer to start after your notice period, then quit from your job (safe in the knowledge you had a freelance gig lined up) and serve out your notice period at your employer. Then move to the freelance gig. And during the freelance gig set up your actual business.
If they prevented you from having those sorts of chats while employed, they'd effectively be preventing you from getting another job, which I can see would be in their interests, but can't possibly be legal. But, not sure, I am not a lawyer. Let us know what you find out if you investigate this route further!
Hah, I misunderstood you then. I thought you meant for me to freelance on the side.
But writing on linkedin that I’m available for freelancing is kind of risky, isn’t it?
Hey Kasper :)
Shameless plug but I just talked about how to test your value proposition in my free book :) http://www.productizemarketing.co
Hey, I'm going to read that :) Thanks!