I don't want to be rude, but this is pretty elitist. Essentially:

"Can't you all just run your startup companies and make 220,000 a year like me?"

Some people are overvalued by the market, working in a good space, being attractive and having "reputation" or a lot of online prsence, fame, etc.

It sounds like you personally have a lot of accomplishments, old = "wisdom", and are attractive as a consultant. You have experience doing a lot ofthe things people pay you to consult on but they aren't willing (or you are not) to come on board full time.

tldr, some people can't just make large salaries, but they would take worse terms to bet on themselves.

Edit: to be clear i am being sincere here. If you are older and really really good at what you do, and have a lot of reputation thats great. There is ageism in tech for sure, they want young hungry devs AND older experienced architects to come in and provide advice.

So it is a doubleedged sword, there may be less opportunity for a 50-60 year old programmer to join the team, but opportunity to consult. There also may be a log of spots for a 20 y/o programmer to join, but no room to come in and provide sftwr engineering advice.

I am 26 and a so so dev. Would I take a shitty deal? Depends how shitty. Id give up 10-15% at poor terms, or I would think about it at least. It may end up being less risky than taking a while to build a prototype and trying to build a funding and legal structure with a SAFE and cryptocurrency and other shit.

So yeah, I am leery of deals like this main post, but there is a part of ne that would love beleive it would ve possible to cap up quick and painlessly and with a quick call and application. Terms would be reasonable and I could start working faster, etc.

Hiwever, it would be hard for me to believe that...

This is a really great, well thought out and clearly presented point and it makes a lot of sense.

The original, year 1 YC program was targeting people who genuinely would struggle to get $6K (at the time) because it was mostly aimed at students.

When I was a student I couldn't afford text books, so the idea I could get $20k together by consulting was laughable.

Now I'm positively ancient the consulting route isn't too hard to do.

Maybe, depends on where you are located (outside any big tech hub, probably not) and your experience (if we go by the out of college starting a startup, I don't see a lot of companies paying consulting fees to 25 year olds with very narrow experience.

In a month?

I was able to do two small websites at $5k per + $3.5k in design consulting in a month. It's not $20k but I also wasn't killing myself either. It wouldn't be easy, but it's certainly attainable.

I think the bigger issue here is that $20k is insignificant. If you've already got a full-time job and you're working on this venture as a side-hustle you don't need the $20k. If you're working on this venture full-time and it's your only gig you'll need more than $20k. So I'm not entirely sure where this model fits.

how did you come across that opportunity and how did you land the gig?

One of the website gigs was from the monthly seeking freelancer post here on HN.The two other leads came through dribbble.com (this was nearly a year ago now). The landing part was pretty easy. Just sent my offer and they accepted.

I once did a code review for $3,500 and it took about 8-12 hours. After I was done, they asked me to fix the few bugs I found. I told them I was super busy (which I was) and they offered me $10,000 to do the work ASAP. Since it would only take me 8 or so hours to fix the bugs I could hardly pass it up. For two days of work I walked away with $13,500 dollars, of course there is also tax on that, so I netted like $9,000.

Depending how hard I/you try to find consulting work, you can totally make 20k, of course it depends on the month. The best part, is that you can write off business expenses on your taxes. So, you pay significantly less (if any) tax on that 20k.

Okay how many of those can you find in a year though?

I found $20 on the ground once. Doesn't mean I can just go outside and start bending over till I get to 20k.

I mean, it depends.

If you join a bunch of the freelance marketplaces it's really not hard. I literally receive offers for jobs every day or so, most aren't that good, but probably once every month or two it is as described.

The problem is, I have no idea going in if a code review is going to be easy, or if the bugs are easy to fix. That's somewhat just luck.

What freelance marketplaces do you use? I'm always looking for people who are consistently good, but I'm wary of Elance/Upwork.

what kind of skills are you looking for? I believe I am (we are) good at a few things

Hi, do you have a company URL?

> If you join a bunch of the freelance marketplaces it's really not hard

Hmm I've always heard the exact opposite. I haven't seen a freelance type of marketplace that isn't a huge race to the bottom. Whenever I've done consulting it's always been through contacts that I know; I've never found a way to actually make decent money through other means.

You do a few jobs on the cheapish, and quite often they will recommend you. Like I said, most of my jobs are through people finding me through various other projects. Contacts, like you said.

What freelance marketplaces do you join? We're on elance but its basically a race to the bottom

This sounds a lot like gloating. I'm sure a lot of us would like to find consulting work but don't really have an inkling as to where to find it. It feels like more of a matter of knowledge / networking rather than how hard one tries.

I did C/C++ tutoring, and did freelance work on both OpenCV and Qt projects. I get offers from the people I tutored, being active on forums, multiple freelance networks, and having an active github.

It wasn't supposed to be gloating, it was more - it's not as hard as you think.

Any tips on finding clients this desperate for code reviews and bug fixes?

Be active on projects on github related to areas you are interested in (i.e. Rails, Node) or elsewhere. Also, there are plenty of freelance market places.

Protip: Have a high bill rate and work in a niche but critical area.

I've spent 20+ years helping people designing, build & move entire datacenters. Migration of one or two servers is easy. It's exponentially harder when you have to move hundreds or thousands of servers running many apps with minimal downtime.

Still not sure how I ended up specializing in this but there was a need and still is. Turns out a lot of that experience is still applicable for customers moving to the cloud =)

No. I did not mean $20k in a month. I meant that over a period of a few months.

Sure, why not? If you bill $100/hr, that's only 200 hours per month, or 8 hours per day at 6 days a week.

I think you mean "in an hour?", which is how long the meeting lasts.