50'000 Followers! How to Product & Growth Consultant 101

Let's spill the tea!

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Hi, my name is Leah. I specialize in honest and realistic, scaling go-to-market motions of tech companies in B2B SaaS in a no-bs way that understands growth as a holistic executive challenge, not a marketing or product function.

I’m all about product-led growth and sales to build trust with markets that are as cost-efficient and scaleable as possible.

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I was told I need to have an inspirational picture of me on the Italian coast that does not reflect my life at all. Here you go.

I have reached 50’000 followers on LinkedIn! 🚀🚀🚀 That means:

• I introduce myself at parties by saying, “Hi, my name is Leah. I’m an influencer in B2B.”

• I get to write self-celebratory articles like this to inflate my ego.

• I don’t need therapy anymore. I’m very important.

No, it actually means I’m doing one of my write-ups on what’s going on behind the curtain. They are is usually quite popular, so let’s do another one; this time, it’s all about the retainer / advising side of the business.

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Earlier write-ups:

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Let’s map it out and answer the following questions:

• What are the major differences between your role as a PM vs an independent PM Consultant?

• Which stage of projects do you select - idea stage, execution stage, maintenance stage?

• How do you grow and maintain a good flow of projects after your first client?

• Why do people hire a fractional PM?

• Once the problem to be solved is established, how do we ask for the right types of analytics and other resources?

• Can you provide examples of what an output might look like?

• Longevity - Do you feel that creating your firm has benefits in protecting against ageism in tech? Women and ageism in tech? Women in tech? Etc.

• How do I know whether I’m good enough to do this? I have an impostor syndrome.

• How realistic is it really to build a career as a solopreneur in 2024?

Terminology

Before we get started, let’s clarify a couple of terms when it comes to advising / retainers and my relation to them:

Interim

Interim positions are full-time (100%) operational roles but are limited in duration. They typically go for less than a year, and that’s a clear boundary defined before you start. → I do interim positions and am currently (April 2024) employed as an Interim CPGO at GotPhoto. The plan is to take several months of breaks between interims to balance the high intensity of them

Fractional

A fractional engagement is operational with a limited percentage but unlimited duration. For instance, as a 40% PM, you would typically work two instead of five days per week. → I haven’t done fractional engagements so far, and I don’t plan to. The reality is often that fractional contracts are full-time stress under the cover of part-time contracts and less pay.

Advising

Advising is a highly paid, strategic engagement with clients that happens in a very limited time (usually one hour per week, on a retainer), where they get my pointed advice on topics on a regular basis. I have limited touch points with the operative teams in those types of engagements and usually advise with the CEO / Board → I actively do advising mandates but keep them low. While they don’t consume a lot of time, they take a lot of context-switching which I don’t take lightly.

Board Mandates

Board Mandates are what it says on the tin. You go into a company's board ideally for 2-3 years and help out wherever your advice is needed with your network and expertise. → While I’m open to board positions I have actively rejected them so far until the right ones come around the corner. This is because I don’t want to tie myself to a company for the next few years while my brand grows this fast.

Leah

You might be reading this without knowing who I am. I’m Leah, and I’m a growth Solopreneur out of Switzerland - I advise B2B Scaleups on how to get Product-led Growth right. As you know from the title of this article, I now have 50,000 followers on Linkedin.

I built my brand and business over the last two to three years from “nothing” except my operative experience as a PM and Product Leader. I’m also writing very openly about my experience here on Substack.

In short, I started part-time advising and earning money as a Consultant PM while I was still working full-time at Smallpdf in 2021 and have since gone rogue full solopreneur as of 2023.

Your Questions

I reached out to my community, and some of the questions are so valuable that I would like to make them the meat of this article:

What are the major differences between your role as a PM vs an independent PM Consultant?

This question can be separated into two categories: how is it different as an Interim full-time and how as an advisor?

Interim

As an interim, your responsibility from day one is to lay the foundation for a successor. The focus here is oftentimes a mix of operational experience (in my case, how to structure a scale-up product org with sales/marketing). Industry knowledge is a nice bonus but usually not the main reason you are there. Usually, things are already burning. Otherwise, a company wouldn’t consider spending that much money on you.

I’ve never been told that I’m coming in for a project that is “done,” so you’re usually there to bridge some kind of gap until the definite, recurring solution is there.

That means four things:

• You cannot burn your successor's “capital” with decisions that leave them in a bad spot. For instance, as a product leader, I’m careful not to restructure teams fundamentally, as you shouldn’t change things too often so my successor can do this better to their liking.

• While you might be directly managing people, they “know” that you’re only there for a shorter period. That can be a taxing aspect of your job. People don’t know whether they can rely on you, and structuring growth plans can be difficult. Building trust with your peers is difficult but necessary.

• You are expected to ramp up quickly. Since you won’t be there for a long time, you have some privileges and very specific expectations put on you. Expect the first 1-2 months to be brutal. You should not “grow” into an interim position but already be experienced in this role’s seniority. (I.e. if you never lead people, it would be risky to go as an interim into a group PM role where you have to manage suddenly three teams)

  • The beginning focuses on your expertise on broken processes and other generalizable best practices (like standards for an onboarding flow, or how to run a proper product team); you don’t need to know the industry for that very well. That means you have to be in a lot of 1-on-1s to understand the people and their processes. Dig deep.

• I structure my contracts to be easy to enter and dissolve. You’re oftentimes involved in hiring your own successor, and your being able to come on and go out fast is part of your offering. You are there to be flexible, which is an important differentiator I have over other people who do not have this flexibility.

If you do interims, aim for 2-4x (incl. equity) of your normal fixed salary to compensate for the higher risk (uncertainty) and workload.

Workwise, you’re doing the same as the person who comes after you with the caveats above and the reminder that whatever you do, don’t make the company dependent on you by keeping knowledge to yourself.

As an advisor

As an advisor, you usually work with very few individuals in the company. My simple contracts entail weekly calls with my clients for a limited amount of time: typical points to help are usually low-time/high-value activities:

• Hiring support in the last stages (evaluating the best candidates) for a job where the company lacks experience (i.e., as a self-proclaimed Growth expert, I help companies find and evaluate their first growth hire).

• Hiring support in setting up a profile for a first hire. Same as before, but here, you would share tailored job descriptions and advise the company on what to look out for when sourcing candidates.

• Connect the company with high-value contacts or points to start from your network. “Hey Leah, we are dipping our toes into automated marketing outbound; how should we approach this?” - “Hey, I’m not an expert myself, but I’ll make an intro to X; she’s very good at this topic, and I trust her 100%; I’d have a chat with her.” → The point here is not to sell the services of another consultant. While that might happen, it is in your interest that you connect people with each other who truly benefit from each other. A good contact will help your clients out in a short call and get them started without charging for every minute.

• Data interpretation, industry pattern recognition. This heavily depends on where you advise; if it’s in an area where you have a lot of industry knowledge, you are valuable simply because you know industry patterns. (For instance, for me, this would be if I would advise for Adobe’s PDF products)

• Process pattern recognition. You should be an expert in what you claim to advise on; as a senior PM, that would be how to manage a team from start to finish, for instance. This is quite tricky from afar because you are just an advisor, and you rely on hearsay from what the CEO tells you if you advise them. That means you have low context and data on which to base your advice. Here, it helps a lot to go a bit above and beyond and dig deeper and talk to more people in the company if they let you (and don’t charge extra for it; consider it research)

• Asking the tough questions and pushing back. A lot of leaders do not get a lot of feedback during their day, and in some structures, people don’t push back at all due to their position. Because you are an advisor, you have the ability to call out mistakes in a way no one else can. This took me a lot to get used to, but it has been invaluable. Sometimes, people need to hear the obvious from an external person to accept it. And even if they don’t act on your critical feedback, they more often than not take it at heart, even if it doesn’t appear to be this way initially.

• Stage-appropriate tooling recommendations. This is also quite typical; you will be asked what tools they should use for new processes, and having a good list (and even good conditions) of tools you did use yourself is always welcome with their associated pros/cons. Stage-appropriate means that you should be able to identify which tool is the right fit for which stage. Recommending a five people startup a huge analytics integration just because you know it is a mistake.

• Easy reachability. There is a massive difference between whether you are reachable only once a week in a face-to-face call or offer pointed advice in a more personal setting by connecting through Slack / Whatsapp. I always offer this to my clients, and they use it happily. So far, this has never gone overboard, but whenever they need me urgently, they appreciate it a lot when I answer fast.

Do not pretend that you know the answer to every question that your client asks. The goal is to help; sometimes, that’s by you referring them to someone else; sometimes, that means, "I can’t help you there. I’m sorry.” To pretend that you know best all the time when you don’t is counterproductive and hurts you and your client in the long run. Stick to your guns.

You’re an advisor, a friend who is knowledgeable and not afraid to criticize, not an oracle.

Which stage of projects do you select - idea stage, execution stage, maintenance stage?

I’m assuming this question aims at the size of the company. I stopped advising early-stage companies and aim now mostly for B2B scaleups beyond ten million in annual revenue. The reason here is twofold:

• Impact on the company: Early-stage companies usually do not have the pockets to pay very well and often offer equity pay only. While that’s totally fine to start out with, I also think that my outsized impact lies more in growth. In this way, if I make one team better in a small startup by 50%, that might still be far less money per year of impact than if I improve the processes of 10 teams by “only” 20%. Above a certain rate (probably 500$/h) startups can’t pay anymore unless they have insane traction.

• Pre- and post-product market fit (growth) are different skills: While I consider myself to be strong when it comes to innovation, my core competence now lies in scaled processes when it comes to growth. This means I can talk about not only how onboarding should look but also how an entire growth department is built, structured, and fits into a big company. This is a rare, monetizable skill that I also enjoy flexing. This also includes my experience in how to handle boards and big C-Level teams with middle management layers in between, aka companies that scale beyond 100+ people.

That doesn’t mean that you should do the same because early-stage companies are usually also much more forgiving and, frankly, just much more fun to work with. I also occasionally take on customers who are not perfectly fitting the scale up mold because I love their products so much, but it’s rare. But even they are usually on the brink of scaling.

Just know your positioning in this regard and exclude others. Anthony Pierri, for instance, does this very well on his LinkedIn profile by specifically targeting a segment with an even clearer targeted offer:

This is a great example of clear targeting customers and playing to your strengths.

I try to do the same narrow positioning for myself:

I clearly exclude early stage startups and B2C companies for a reason while also mentioning specifically my area of expertise: Growth.

This positioning is very important because this is what you “sort” in your inbound. I don’t want anyone else to reach out. That’s why I’m doing it. I usually don’t have much to “select” from because my positioning is this clear. I simply don’t want B2C clients, and I’m happy about that.

Could I make more money by opening my positioning? Definitely not; I would have more calls and inbound requests overall, but fewer calls from those I want and a higher chance of leaving this customer unhappy. I’m not good at B2C and startups for my price, and I know that.

How do you grow, and maintain a good flow of projects after your first client?

This is a very complex question, and I answer it thoroughly in this article here:

The Solopreneur Audit. How's it going?

but let me try to give you a very high-level summary. Whatever your channel is where you create demand:

Disclaimer: I don’t believe in outbound (mailing, messaging directly prospects), save for some very rare examples. Meaning I don’t look for my clients. The reason for that is that the field is very crowded and the pay is therefore also usually not worth the additional stress. I also feel anxious about “selling” myself to people.

In order to answer your question, I need to explain my first principle approach to generating inbound here:

I depend on good word of mouth. That means my client has to be happy when we are done. Very happy. While that is clear, it creates some difficult constraints:

• I need to go above and beyond sometimes. The first month with a client is the one where I usually invest more time than agreed. That’s fine.

• In order to be worth it, I need to charge enough. A painful lesson I learned is that 100$/h clients attract more than 100$/h clients. It’s great when you get recommended by others but it’s jarring when the first thing you have to tell them is: “I charge you double than what I charged your friend.” That means, price yourself where you want to be, even if that means that you don’t get a lot of clients.
  If you don’t do that, you might be successful with a lot of low-value clients and then have no more time to find higher-value ones because you’re stressed out. This is a vicious cycle, especially if it’s your livelihood.

• Don’t be complicated. I work with contractors and advisors myself. I absolutely hate it when they are being complicated by counting beans and overcomplicating negotiations. If I’m getting a headache because our contracts have to go through legal three times before I can work with you, I won’t forward this pain to my friends. Include being simple in your price and charge accordingly.

In order to create this demand, I speak about problems that commonly happen for my ideal clients without advertising my services. This is about being product-led. Give value. With time, people come back over and over and trust you. This trust is not fake and allows you to get contacts with a lot of goodwill.

• Be consistent in the channel of your choice: If you write a newsletter like this one, be persistent. Whether you write weekly or monthly, do it on the regular. Whatever your cadence is.

However, there are also direct conversion tools like appearances on podcasts and webinars from other outlets. I generated three advising clients from this video alone. It was one of my first appearances, during which I talked about what we were doing at Smallpdf. These are excellent to get started.

When I was asking my clients how they heard about me, they mentioned this video (which at the time only had 200 views) but also mentioned, “I also saw your newsletter, it was very useful for me.”

You won’t score massive contracts with that, but it’s great to get started and do it occasionally. If you watch the video, you also hear that I’m not overly marketing my services. Most of the presentation is about a real problem with a real solution.

All it took was me researching on the web and reaching out to a couple of these video podcasts/webinars, and eventually, some said, “We would like to have you.” You provide them with content, and they give you reach. Win-Win.

That was also the beginning of me having references I could link to my speaking and presentation abilities, an important factor for advising. People want to know how you look, talk, and whether you match their company culture.

Why do people hire a fractional PM?

The simple and obvious answer here is threefold:

• To push a project with an end date through. You see this often when a company is launching new initiatives that can be “done” or have a high investment up front with less maintenance afterward. Examples would be redesigns of internal products, the implementation of a CMS for Marketing teams to work on, SSO, or external facing projects like API documentation setting up an A/B Testing environment, or simply reworking a homepage and onboarding flow to iron out the most obvious mistakes.

• Cover a hiring gap that is putting them in a difficult position. This usually happens when a company grows faster than they can hire. You can see this when they have to stop hiring talents despite having money and hire a lot more people for HR so they can in fact, start to actually hire others.
  Until they have their own talented people to ramp up hiring, you are a perfect fit to come in for a couple of months until things have calmed. → Pro tip: companies that just raised funds are very commonly in this situation. Excellent to try your luck and reach out if you feel like you can help them cover.

• You can also see fractional positions commonly in smaller companies due to strained budgets, so they can test something new before they decide to put a full-time PM on.

Once the problem to be solved is established, how do we ask for the right types of analytics and other resources?

Always ask for internal people inside of the company to talk to directly on top. While the CEO might have handy charts and data, talking to different people in general is important. Don’t be afraid to challenge data validity and try to establish how a claim has been established they give you.

• Whenever possible I also ask for specific access to their database so I can query myself. To get the help of one of their business analysts/product managers is absolutely invaluable.

• Also, ask for qualitative interviews; almost every company records good interviews of their sales calls or user interviews somewhere.

In short, be a good Product Manager, as you would normally be. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You are paid to ask questions until you understand. Where there are gaps, try to fill them yourself by doing your own research and cross-checking them afterward with people in the company.

Don’t expect your client to hand you instructions on how to do your job. They love it when you are proactive.

Can you provide examples of what an output might look like?

While I can’t link you here with an exact output of what I do for my clients, a typical artifact would be an ICP study, where the output is a definition of 3-4 ICP profiles that the entire company then works with. Or an ODI analysis (Point 3.4), where we research how new ideas rank against each other.

Another common one is to rework an onboarding flow or pricing and packaging based on best practices from my experiences. This happens almost always as this is part of my PLG offering.

A more tangible example would be a one-pager slide for product teams on how to present their Ideas, basically providing tailored templates for them to use. The problem I often solve in that case is the inability of PMs to manage up properly.

Are you an industry-specific consultant? Do you enter projects with extensive background knowledge of the business/market?

Little Industry Knowledge:

Most commonly, I have little knowledge about the industry but deep knowledge about their go-to-market motion (SaaS, PLG and Product-led Sales). This leads to an interesting dynamic for most of the engagements:

• In the beginning, it’s about best practices that I have learned from experience. During that time, I also tried to understand the industry better and learned quite a lot that I didn’t know beforehand.

But it would be foolish to assume that I understand their industry better after a couple of months. However, gaining a base knowledge paired with my GTM experience allows me to connect the two and be an important facilitator for new knowledge in the company.

For instance, companies commonly measure NPS as a general measure of customer happiness. They never learned how to use CSAT or CES for individual features. By bringing this into the company, we get new feedback evaluation points that I can then connect with my newly gained knowledge.

In either case, I try to connect whatever I can from my experience and amplify their knowledge. The best thing happens when you have the one person in the room who knows everything about the market (commonly the CEO or Head of Sales), and I can go back and forth about some ideas and data points we surfaced.

Deep Industry Knowledge:

If I get contacted by someone in an industry in which I have deep knowledge and also extensive GTM experience, we have a winner. Those mandates are rare but it’s reflected in a higher rate and less stress for me. I ramp faster and can generate value almost immediately.

However, be very careful here. It’s easy to get high on your supply. Even direct competitors of the same products have intricacies where you should not overstretch your learned frameworks. Be critical and humble about your knowledge.

Longevity - Do you feel that creating your firm has benefits in protecting against ageism in tech? Women and ageism in tech? Women in tech? Etc.

I find this very hard to answer because I have not experienced much of it. I don’t mean to say that it doesn’t exist; it’s just exactly what you said: because people perceive me on my brand, so “me” there is no question about gender and age. It also helps of course that I’m advising on such a senior level that I’m considered still young for what I do.

So maybe the answer to this question is yes. Brand helps to eliminate the competition so that’s maybe how I’m protected against it. I don’t compete by handing in my CV so it’s not a question at all.

If I were advertising junior PM work, I would imagine that it would be quite hard. But even then, the same principle applies everywhere: If you create value and specialize yourself in something and people believe that you love it you will be paid for it. It’s not easy, and it takes time to create awareness wherever you are, but remember that I started from absolute zero three years ago and now approach a seven figure business per year.

And I had no idea about any of this back then other than my experience as a PM and Leader.

How do I know whether I’m good enough to do this? I have an impostor syndrome

I feel you. One of the reasons why I never really got started was that I didn’t trust myself. I felt like an impostor every day. While I still get this feeling on a bad day, I learned two things:

• Everyone else is winging it, and I overestimate them

• I am an expert in a lot of things just because I love doing them, but they seem easy to me

It’s also ok to just suck at a lot of things as long as you excel at others. A very practical way of getting started was to register myself on the mentoring club and similar sites and start to advise for free.

Even though there was no payment involved, I was terrified. What questions will they ask? What if I mess someone up? What if I can’t answer their questions?

If there is no money involved, this pressure is removed, and you will gain a great picture of where you struggle and where you excel. If advising others for free is still too scary for you, try using one of these free mentors yourself first.

This puts you in the customer's shoes, and you see how they handle the same challenge from their perspective without you feeling any pressure.

In one way or another, you need to put yourself out there; you will learn along the way.

You also might be surprised how much others are willing to help you if you just ask. If you find a great mentor, ask them how they arrived there.

How realistic is it really to build a career as a solopreneur in 2024?

I can only speak from my own experience. It’s tough, and it takes time, but there are a lot of steps in between before you become a full-time solopreneur. From the free mentorship to getting your first couple of advisorships etc. etc.

All of this can be done on the side of a full-time job so you can learn along the way. But I am realistic; I sacrificed a lot to be where I am, and for most people, this would not be the ideal thing to do. They don’t have the energy, commitment, and life circumstances to “pay” for it.

However, establishing some optionality is possible for everyone with time and commitment. It makes you better in your main job and everywhere else. It’s professional self-care, and I’m very glad I went through it from start to finish.

I recorded with Elena Verna last year an episode on how we view Growth Solopreneurship, back then I was still doing this part-time:

Closing thoughts

Whether you are reading this as a first-timer that I will never see again or as one of my trusted recurring supporters, thank you.

Thank you for spending your time in your busy day.

Thank you for enabling me to do all this, directly or indirectly, by sharing it with others.

You all truly make it worthwhile. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Now go out there and stand up for yourself. 💪

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