April 19, 2026
Cold emails vs clout wars
Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?
Solo coder goes freelance; Hacker News yells: pick a niche, call your old contacts
TLDR: A solo developer launched a consultancy to fix small-business back-office chaos and offered 10 free hours, but the crowd says the real secret is past relationships and a sharp niche. Debate centered on networking versus cold outreach, with extra love for being Google-able for one ultra-specific problem.
A veteran coder just hung out a shingle to fix small-business chaos—think broken spreadsheets, clunky workflows, and AI that looks cool but does nothing—and offered the first five clients 10 free hours via crescita.cc. The comment section? Instant group therapy for freelancers.
The loudest chorus screams: your old coworkers are your first sales team. One user says every gig came from people they’d previously worked with—no cold emails, just reputation. Another voice, a startup CEO, drops the cold shower: “general consultancy is insanely crowded,” with inboxes flooded weekly and global competitors undercutting prices. The fix, they say: be the person for one specific pain—not “I do software,” but “I fix this one headache better than anyone.”
Then the clout stories roll in. An early adopter bragged they were so ahead on a hot web tech that anyone Googling for solutions found their GitHub, bringing inbound gigs and instant credibility. Another commenter “accidentally” became a news company’s CTO off a Drupal side gig. And a freshly independent engineer says they were headhunted on LinkedIn and dropped into a beautiful disaster of a Linux migration—“everything’s a mess, so I’m riding it.”
The vibe: network > niche > content > cold outreach—in that order. Free hours are nice, but the crowd swears: become the obvious answer to a very specific problem.
Key Points
- •A software engineer with 10+ years’ experience has started a solo consultancy targeting SMEs.
- •The service focuses on back-office issues: spreadsheet-heavy processes, brittle workflows, poor reporting, integrations, backend/platform problems, and practical AI workflows.
- •The author does not want to become a generic agency, preferring clients with clear operational pain.
- •They ask how others landed first projects and which outreach channels worked (networking, content, cold outreach, partnerships, subcontracting).
- •To attract early clients, the author offers the first five clients 10 free hours and shares the website crescita.cc for contact.