Have you worked as a consultant at the same time as your startup?

I did that. Gave me some schedule flexibility, time, and additional cash to make things go. Consulted with a 50-person e-commerce company – it was big enough that I was able to genuinely help them, and I learned a few tricks that I used in my startup’s marketing. Was a great experience.

Did the consulting route, the two downsides are:

1) its hard to concentrate on the startup when you’re juggling another gig

2) the darn IP assignment aspect, if you’re taking on a programming gig, often there’s this form that says whatever you design belongs to them blah blah, its often VERY broad, so you need to redline the document and often you get pushback from the client so its a delicate dance to not accidentally assigning your startup code to them.

Any advice on were and how to find consultant gigs? Trying to do just this, but found that I’ve had to spend a large amount of time wining and dining my network, visiting events to get new contacts, spend time with the sales process, writing contracts etc.

Tried to get some cooperation with larger firms, but there they of course prefer their own consultants, even if you’re a better fit (got a few gigs yanked that way, when they suddenly had one of their own free).

Also seen that even if I have several promising leads, they can go cold or pushed to a later date for any number of (unimaginable) reasons, like internal politics/changes and that they’re even too overworked to be able to finish the deal.

This all boils down that a lot of time, and especially energy, is being directed on this (and a constant roller coaster like the rest of the startup experience), not allowing me to focus on my own company in between the gigs which was my idea from the start.

So far mostly been focusing on traditional companies, though I’ve tried to make some more connections with other startups (but a lot of them are bootstrapping them self and don’t really have a lot of money). Done one job for another startup, which was really fun and learned a lot, but had to squeeze my pay to a minimum for they to afford it.

Would you say putting more energy into startups would be a good path? Also been an idea of mine, as I guess a lot of them might prefer to have work done on an contract basis instead of long term employment, to not be tied up with cost (also been a problem of mine that people want to hire me instead of having as an consultant).

Need a good way to find startups in the segment were they’ve started to build up some cash/some funding, but not enough to only want to hire, for this to be viable.

Also thinking that I might need to shift focus more to longer term gigs (as in one to a few years), but then it will probably take most of my time and energy and be the same as having a job in that way. Only benefit is that you probably get paid a bit more and can save it up in the company, but it still pushes the time when you can work on the things you want to into the future again.

Lastly I’ve not yet explored trying to get fully remote gigs in other cities/countries. Would be great if anyone could share experience with this and tips for finding them.