u/DropFancy9319

I’m early in my freelance consulting journey and could use some advice from others who’ve made the transition successfully.

I have ~15 years of experience in marketing, mostly in tech, and I’m trying to position myself as a consultant for early-stage startups. The challenge is that most of my network is in big tech, so I’m finding the business development side harder than expected, especially building relationships and getting in front of startup founders who actually need help.

For those who’ve been through this:

• How did you find your first few startup clients?
• What channels or communities actually worked?
• Did you rely mostly on networking, content, referrals, outbound, partnerships, etc.?

Would appreciate any honest advice or lessons learned.

For B2B SaaS founders, when do you decided you need a marketer or product marketer to help you with your:

• company positioning
• sales pitch and playbook
• go-to-market engine (outbound or inbound)
• product launch process
• demand generation

When you decide you need this help, what do you do? Hire for fulltime? Or a consultant? If a consultant how do you find one that you work with?