From SaaS to Selling My Expertise
When I left my startup, I was eager to build my own SaaS. As a solo founder, I now had the freedom to chase smaller, niche markets. At Antler, many good ideas were dismissed because the markets were considered too small, but alone, these niches seemed promising. Yet, most of my ideas still felt too minor to justify the time and effort. I needed a real business problem, something significant enough that companies would actually pay to solve. But how would I find it?
Someone suggested a different approach: start by selling my expertise through consulting. Initially, this seemed counterintuitive since I wanted to create products, not sell time. But consulting offered clear benefits: it would allow me to identify genuine, recurring problems businesses were facing, and it was a practical way to quickly learn sales and marketing. Skills I’d need to launch a successful product later.
My first thought was to sell my skills to accountants. I assumed a boring industry would be lucrative. But this quickly failed. Despite my experience in financial reporting, I didn’t truly understand the real problems accountants faced daily. This made it impossible to communicate clear value, leading to immediate dead-ends. It became obvious I needed to sell something directly tied to my actual expertise.
I paused to reconsider what I had genuinely done well during my career:
Handled IT and infrastructure as the sole tech person in a small company.
Built reporting tools and integrations in a wealth management firm.
Managed a software team at Swappie, improving refurbishment operations and profitability.
The obvious choice would be to sell my expertise as a software developer, but it does not help me find recurring problems quickly. The option I chose to pursue was smartphone refurbishment operations. It is a growing market where I have real experience. At Swappie, I had worked on improving operations by identifying bottlenecks, automating processes, and making production leaner and more profitable.
Now knowing what my expertise is I needed to figure out my customer and offer. I started with Finnish refurbishers, then expanded to small-to-mid-sized smartphone refurbishers across Europe (companies with about 10–20 employees and €2–20M annual revenue). I assumed that this would be great niche as they would be big enough to have operational pains, but lack the resources to address them.
Consulting is broad, so I needed a clearly defined offer. I quickly reached out to potential clients on LinkedIn. After just a couple of contacts, I landed my first sale. Two approaches emerged:
Attempt #1: Offered a refurbishment optimization audit, this failed because it felt too abstract and unclear.
Attempt #2: Offered practical, tangible workshops on operational improvements, this succeeded. Clients understood exactly what they would gain.
This experience taught me a crucial lesson: clients prefer clear, tangible solutions over vague audits, especially when trust is still being established.
The success of the initial workshops validated not only my expertise but also the existence of genuine operational problems that refurbishers faced. Some of the insights I expected to be most valuable didn’t turn out that way. I will need to keep refining my consulting offer based on the client feedback and my observations.
Selling has been really hard for me. I feel like pestering people and when they are not responding I feel like I blew the whole thing up. When in reality people are just busy and get a lot of sales spam. Even though I made a sale after just a few messages, I still felt like things were going to fail and I should pivot. That is something that was easier with a team.
In the next post, I’ll share more details about how I approached sales: which tools I used to find leads, how I reached out, and what worked (or didn’t).
