Ask HN: How does a 3 man consultancy land projects, not just contracts?

The main influence on the kind of contracts you can get is the way you market yourself.

Don't market yourself as a 3 man team, market yourself just as a consultancy, don't explicitly state the size. Have a nice portfolio and people will just see what they want to. If you can complete the work asked for then I wouldn't see this as an issue, although some people would.

Some good contracts to start with (at least in the UK), are small government tenders. I don't know where you're from or what the system is like there.

Also try target more upmarket clientele. Law firms etc. Instead of charging a large fee for the work, charge a smaller fee but have a recurring monthly support cost. If they want the site updated do that, if they have some small feature to add, add it (within reason, some clients will try take advantage of this).

I am in a similar position, (although the "no problem getting contracts" is a bit of stretch), a few miles south of you in Kent.

I have a vision, of an eco-system of small independant Open Source developers building, integrating and supporting local and central government software. (Yes, government)

I have a tiny campaign site at www.oss4gov.org/manifesto and there is a community of OSS developers but the love they get from the billion dollar government market is tiny.

Why .gov? I do not want to write another website for some marketing agency, I want to write actual software, and I want to write software that has an actual impact on my community.

For example, West Lothian wants an "Election Management System" (#). This is basically to take the poll register and do everything from orgnise rotas of poll-helpers, send out the voting cards, and so forth. Its pretty boring I suspect but it is clearly something that only governments need. Is there an Open Source version? Not that I can find. Is it possible to persuade West Lothian to pay for the development - well I am trying but they state right up front - must already be in use in another council, tried and tested. THis is for software that runs elections - what the hell are proprietary software companies doing in there? If any code should be public and open it is code that runs elections.

There are thousands of government services that have no or terrible IT, that do not interoperate and yet GDS states that the government prefers OSS, that GCloud is for open, small businesses. The rhetoric is good, the reality of risk-averse tenders is much much different.

Somewhere along the line we can see governments stop pouring our money into proprietary code that only serves public uses and start seeing small local consultancies, feeding on a eco-system of open source code and delivering great custom services to government that just keep getting better, for a decent living wage. (well hopefully better than that)

Bugger it, I am going to release my best shot at an election management system, and force it into the cracks. There is a lot of money and a lot of worthwhile projects behind that wall. Despite the 30% cut in services.

It is a project with real possibilities

- International elections (http://aceproject.org/today/feature-articles/open-source-sof...)

- There are organisations doing something like this (http://blog.openelections.net/)

(#) http://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/search/show/Search...