r/consulting
Independent consultants and small firms
- Size
- Mid-size
- Buying intent
- Medium
- Promotion
- Conditional
Members buy tools out of personal profit rather than a departmental budget, which makes decisions fast, price sensitivity high, and the sales cycle effectively a single conversation. If the value is obvious they will buy today; if it needs explaining they will not buy at all.
The community mixes independents with people at large firms, and the two groups have almost nothing in common commercially. The independents are your market and the large-firm members are noise, so learning to tell the two apart quickly is most of the work.
What people actually post
The admin overhead post
Proposals, invoicing, time tracking and client reporting eating billable hours. Direct, quantifiable pain.
The pricing question
How to structure rates and retainers. Occasionally relevant to tooling, mostly a conversation about confidence.
The big-firm thread
Hours, exit opportunities and internal politics. Large volume, no purchasing relevance for a small vendor.
What people get wrong about it
People treat this as one audience. Independents and large-firm employees share a feed and have almost nothing in common commercially.
Can you promote in r/consulting?
Tolerant of a disclosed mention in a relevant thread and hostile to anything that looks like an agency or a course. The community has a low opinion of people selling to consultants.
What gets you removed
Anything resembling a course, a mastermind or a lead generation service. The community has a settled and very low opinion of that entire category.
A good first contribution
Answer a pricing or scoping question with a concrete number from your own experience. Vagueness is the norm here and specificity stands out immediately.
Products that fit here
- Proposal and contract tooling
- Time tracking and billing
- Client portals and reporting
- Anything reducing unbillable hours
What does not work
Enterprise pricing and annual contracts. An independent will not sign a year for software they are trialling this week.
Timing
January and September, when independents restructure their practice around new client cycles.
How it compares to the neighbours
The communities closest to r/consulting, and how they differ on the three things that decide whether one is worth your time.
| Community | Size | Intent | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/consulting | Mid-size | Medium | Conditional |
| r/smallbusiness | Very large | High | Conditional |
| r/accounting | Large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/ProjectManagement | Mid-size | High | Conditional |
Where this fits in a wider plan
r/consulting appears in our list of the best subreddits for B2B SaaS, which sets it against the other communities worth watching in that market. If you are starting from nothing, the six-week plan in finding your first 100 users covers how to build standing before you mention a product at all.
Watch r/consulting without reading it.
Lidar reads it every day, scores each post against what your product does, and sends you the ones worth answering. Along with the rest of business and operations.