I don't believe the "one less thing to worry about" argument. If I had to pay $30k to close a side-project, I'd have let it die.
Same for not knowing how much work it would be, it makes sense to stop when you realize it's going to be more work than it's worth, even if it creeps up on you.
Just letting a creation of mine die feels like letting a part of myself die. You can say it shouldn't but that's not important; preferences are preferences ;-) and people are weird.
For certain people, myself and perhaps patio11 included, it'd be worth that $30k of opportunity cost.
Not sure why that has been down voted. Yes it does not add up. If you claim you are able to make 30k/week, you don't spend that much time on closing a 57k sale. I'm a sorry but the level of responses here are fanboism at best. Patio11 might be treated as a god here, but that doesn't hide the fact that this is a huge inconsistency ... Like the previous OP I will be down voted for expressing an opinion that deviates to much from the norm on HN. How can we have productive, constructive, discussion when we can't express an opinion. Take aside the name/popularity of the guy and you'll be left with a simple problem: 30k/week versus 3 weeks/57k, dealing with much much less exciting things (you know what I mean if you've dealt with a purchase agreement and the likes...)
This is why I stopped commenting on this thread too, nobody else will even consider the fact that it's at least a bit fishy that you'd do three weeks of boring work to get what you yourself have said amounts to two weeks of your income, which you can get at any time.
This is a really silly subthread. I can make X0k/wk in steady state with a consultancy up and running, at perhaps 70-80% utilization. But to do that, I have to invest Y number of days of overhead to get the consultancy into steady state: I have to prospect for work, I have to write proposals, I have arrange staffing, I have to spend Z hours every week working on scheduling and logistics, and I have to account for all the "breakage" hours that go into keeping a business running†. It is a significant amount of work. From a standing start --- without preexisting contracts to feed me leads on new work, for instance --- it's a tremendous amount of work. Notice how few people do it.
I don't do any of those things right now because, like Patrick, I'm building a pretty complicated piece of software, and don't want to spend the time and energy it takes to get a consulting practice into steady state and keep it there.
We both decided we wanted a break from consulting. Lots of people do that. It's not suspicious; in fact: thinking that it is suspicious is a pretty good tell that someone hasn't ever run a consultancy.
It feels like lots of people on this subthread chose an extreme interpretation of Patrick's story about his consulting practice: that running a practice with an X0k/wk average bill rate means that he also claims to be able to generate X0k/40 on any given hour. Anybody who claims that also probably hasn't run a consulting practice.
I'm not Patrick so it's a bit weird for me to be chiming in like this, but, on the other hand, it's pretty easy for me to point to a pretty big consulting practice that works the way I say it does (hi, NCC US people!), so maybe I can be more helpful in clearing this stuff up and not ratholing on "I've never run a high-value consultancy at scale and all this stuff sounds pretty fishy to me hmmm" stuff.
† Thinking more about why this is the case, it occurs to me that the consultancy running several years in also generates BATNAs for contract negotiations, which makes it easy to walk rates up --- you pay my full fee, or I have my choice of several other clients to give a discount to.
I was on BOS around the same time patio showed up... It's amazing to see how "far" he has come. What he has mastered is marketing to developers, more than anything else. Of course it doesn't add up, because it's like all marketing: all sizzle, no steak.
Same for not knowing how much work it would be, it makes sense to stop when you realize it's going to be more work than it's worth, even if it creeps up on you.