What's your biggest beef?
Tom Critchlow is writing a book in public about becoming an independent consultant, and someone posted this chapter soliciting reactions to this point of view that basically "specialization isn't great":
Having tried to bootstrap an indie consulting practice and fallen on my face, I've got some thoughts on this.
First, I pretty much agree with all of it.
But I come at it from a slightly different POV.
Convergent vs. divergent specialization
I think conventional advice on specialization goes like this:
Identify something your market wants and what you can do, then get laser focused on that.
Tom even says this exactly but raises the most important question, "Are you comfortable with who you might become?"
You might identify the perfect niche (developer tooling companies) and align it with something you're very skilled at (developer education), and yet you will feel like you just trapped yourself in a box.
This feeling of being trapped will burn you out, not the work. That's Tom's point.
My working theory is that there are two types of indie consultants: neurotypical and neurodivergent. And neurodivergent ones are the most common.
My evidence for this?
- In David C Baker's The Business of Expertise, he shares how the majority of his clients have ADHD or some other neurodivergence. This is someone who has been consulting with agency owners for YEARS.
- I learned that I have ADHD since I quit my job. I am undiagnosed, but, well – gestures around – would you really be that surprised? My body of work points to a single conclusion, plus the way I've worked in the past is pretty convincing. I mean, I'm writing this instead of working on my lab that is due next week. 🤷♂️
- Folks I follow and have gotten to know, like Chris or Mariya, are proudly ADHD and have that contrarian, independent POV. Other examples of folks I've followed over the years chiming in can be found in this BlueSky thread.
Tom basically says it without saying indie consultants are neurodivergent:
Many independent consultants are independent for a reason - we’re contrarian, we’re attracted to a myriad, varied array of work. We chase novelty and surprise - we’re often seeking an alternative path. And specialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.
Who is contrarian, attracted to various work, loves novelty and surprise, and seeks alternative paths?
Duh, people with ADHD.
So, here's the thing: a lot of advice for indie consultants may not be "solving for" this variable. They espouse a convergent approach as the solution for specialization versus what resonates with someone like me (and Tom, it seems!), a divergent approach.
By this, I mean the pigeonholing of oneself with skill specialization.
Specializing in a problem instead
I've mentioned before that Jonathan Stark's work was basically formative for my consulting approach.
At first glance, it would seem Jonathan espouses the same convergent approach, but I've been following him long enough (and in his group coaching long enough) to hear a lot of his nuanced advice.
Through him, I learned that it is better to specialize in a problem than a skillset when positioning yourself as an indie consultant.
His XY positioning statement, for example:
I help X with Y
Where Y is "desired outcome." A desired outcome is not skill-based. It's something ambiguous and hard to define – which is why good positioning is so fucking hard.
Jonathan also calls it the expensive problem, and in Tom's words, this would be the "ambiguous problem":
Neurotypical folks would be comfortable specializing in well-defined work based on their skills, but this spells death for neurodivergent folks.
You'll end up the same way I ended up, essentially burned out due to a bad-fit strategy.
The positioning strategy for neurodivergent folks is specializing in problems, not skills.
What's your biggest beef?
This section on "20% Beefs" from Tom via Venkatesh is what struck me the most:
20% beefs are like proof of experience - you can’t properly beef with an established way of thinking without first deeply understanding the orthodoxy. And I think this is the root of the power of 20% beefs - they demonstrate taste, point of view and experience all in one.
When I started out my consulting practice, it was based on a point of view:
Courses would be better for growing developer adoption than blog posts.
But it was just a theory. Since I only had experience on the production side of course creation – the "Well-defined work" side as Tom points out above – I could not provide insights that supported my POV. Not right away, anyway. When I dug deeper into what worked for dev tools like Chef, I found evidence and data to support my POV – but data is not enough. It's not a substitute for wisdom. Wisdom only comes from practice – and working with a single client was not enough to develop deep enough experience.
The root of my mistake was that the beef I picked against traditional developer content marketing did not have proof of experience.
If you came to me now and asked, "Kamran, I want to get out of my 9-5 and try consulting. What do you think?" I would ask,
What's your biggest beef?
This will help you figure out your point of view. Tom is advocating for this for all types of indie consultants and I agree but I would go a step farther and say it's a requirement for neurodivergent folks to start here. It will take you much farther and provide way more motivation than starting with a target market and skill-based approach.
Not knowing the details is a big mistake
Positioning yourself as an independent consultant is strategic work. And the first phase of strategy is to know the details.
The biggest mistake, both for me and others I've seen, is not knowing (or wanting to skip) the details.
When I tried to bootstrap a consulting practice, I didn't know the details of how developer tools went about the process of producing developer education. Therefore, I couldn't properly speak to my ideal customer, and my street cred wasn't there. Therefore, I couldn't build a pipeline of leads. Therefore, the consulting practice couldn't endure.
By the end, after a year or so, I finally understood enough of the details that I could form a strategy I thought might work. But by then it was too late.
If your POV is not based on a deep bench of experience, your strategy will need to start with gathering insights.
If I rebooted developer education consulting, first, I likely wouldn't call it developer education consulting – it would be more about fixing problems with developer adoption. Second, I would advise myself to work full-time at a dev tool startup or in some environment where I'm getting the full breadth of experience to hone my POV. If I can't convince my CMO or the founder of my POV as an FTE, I can't hope to do it when I'm a consultant. Finally, I would start to focus on gathering insights by using experiments to try and test my POV. These insights will be used to shoot flaming arrows of value at my clients down the road.
Choose the path that suits you
That is what I would do if I wanted to play the consulting game but as I've shared, I made the intentional decision I wasn't going to. My runway was too short, and I wasn't enthusiastic about working full-time again in that capacity.
Consulting is just one path among many. When I stopped to reflect on my journey and where I wanted to go, I realized it was not the path I wanted to keep taking based on my unique situation.
Instead, I wanted to focus on growing KTOMG because it already had traction and hell, life is too short to play games in Hard Mode.
My strategy for now is to keep getting experience producing developer education to pay the bills. Then, as I work with Erik on growing Excalibur.js, I will slowly accumulate the proof of experience I can use later on if I still want to – and it will be even more valuable because I'm working at the highest level of altitude.
