Manish Singh

First off, it takes time and some money to find the right consulting projects. What I mean with "right" is a project where you have sufficient margin to generate some good money. Such projects are not easy to find esp if you are just starting in the industry. One way to find such projects is to do consulting in a particular niche. For eg, if you are in the tech consulting and an expert in ipad applications, you may want to find projects in ipad application development rather than focus on broader technologies such as Java.

Secondly, consulting eats your time. In a startup, founder's time is very critical resource. You need to be completely focused on your product development effort instead of troubleshooting client issues. May be hire a consultant to take care of the consulting projects? Well that's a dangerous path to tread into. Sooner than you realize, you have transformed into a fully service consulting company.

Also, investors consider consulting income as a distraction. Many of them would want you to completely stop consulting before they would even consider your business for funding.

This does not mean that consulting is not a way to bootstrap your startup. There are product companies that have used consulting gigs to bootstrap their product development effort. In fact a consulting company is exposed to lot of customer pain points and could be a platform for innovation.