What to sell after leaving a tech job

The thing to sell after leaving a tech job is an outcome you've delivered more than once, to a buyer who already spends money to get it. Put it in one sentence: who buys, what problem, your proof. Then test that sentence with 10 real buyers. The website and the product can wait.

What can you sell after leaving a tech job?

You can sell four things: part of your week in a leadership seat, your judgment, a fixed package of work, or a product. Each one is a different business, with different income and a very different week.

A fractional executive takes a real role at one or more companies, part time (fractional CMO, VP engineering, head of growth), usually on a monthly retainer. An advisor or consultant sells judgment on one specific problem, by project or retainer. A productized service is a fixed scope at a fixed price, like an audit or a four-week sprint.

Software and digital products (tools, templates, courses, paid newsletters) sell without your hours attached. They also take the longest to earn anything.

All four run on the same raw material: an outcome someone will pay for. My rule is outcome first, format second. I run both kinds myself. Madgrowth sells advice and AI agents, and Mazo is software I built. The format question has its own guide: fractional, consulting or software.

How do you find your niche from the career you already have?

Your niche sits where three things overlap: work you've done repeatedly, problems people already ask you about, and buyers who had budget for that result. David C. Baker makes this case in The Business of Expertise. Expertise comes from seeing the same problem many times, and a narrow focus is how you see it often enough to beat a generalist.

So start with an honest inventory of the last 5 to 10 years. Be strict. Your CV will flatter you.

Step 1: list the outcomes you've owned more than once

Write down results you were accountable for, across different companies or teams. Built the first sales team. Moved a product from sales-led to self-serve. Cut infrastructure costs before a fundraise. Took a company into Germany. Rebuilt an onboarding flow that was losing users.

My bar is three times. By the third, you know which parts change from company to company and which stay the same, and that pattern is what a client pays for.

Put a number on everything you can: pipeline, revenue, cost, time, headcount. "Grew pipeline from 2M€ to 8M€ in 18 months at a Series B fintech" (an illustrative example) is a line a buyer can believe. A job title on its own proves very little.

Step 2: write down what people already ask you about

Go through the last year of messages, coffee requests and calls from former colleagues. Note what they wanted help with: hiring a first engineer, pricing a new plan, fixing a stalled launch, deciding whether to raise.

This list is worth more than it looks, because the problem arrives already worded by someone who has it. Copy their words exactly. They'll end up in your offer.

Step 3: find who paid for that outcome

For each outcome, ask who signed off on the money when it mattered. Alan Weiss calls this person the economic buyer: whoever owns the budget for the problem. It's often someone other than the person who feels it most. A marketing manager lives with a flat pipeline. The CEO of a 40-person company approves the spend to fix it.

Then check whether this kind of company has paid an agency, a consultant or a contractor for it before. If yes, a budget line already exists and you're competing for it. That's good news.

If nobody in your target group has ever paid for outside help here, you're asking them to invent a new line item. I wouldn't start there. It's a much harder sale.

Step 4: write the angle as one sentence

Put the three pieces together: a specific buyer in a specific moment, the problem in their words, and your proof. For example: "Seed-stage B2B founders who've just raised and have nobody owning pipeline. I've built that function from zero three times." If you can't fill in all three parts, what you have is a topic, and nobody buys a topic.

What does a good angle look like?

A good angle names a buyer you could list 20 companies for, a moment that makes the problem urgent, and proof with numbers in it. The moment is the part people skip.

Companies buy outside help right after something changes: a funding round, a new VP, a missed quarter, a market launch, a board deadline. Tie your angle to one of those and the buyer knows exactly when to call you.

Here's what that looks like next to a plain title. These are illustrative profiles, not real clients.

The titles in the second column leave the buyer guessing what happens in month one. The angles describe a situation the buyer is in right now, and that's what gets a reply.

Which kind of business should your angle become?

Pick the shape by how you want to work, because one angle can support several. The pipeline angle above could be a fractional seat, a fixed-price audit, a course for first-time growth hires or a reporting tool. What changes is how your week looks and how much of your time each euro costs.

I group these preferences into five Builder Archetypes:

• Broadcaster: your name is the distribution. Content, courses, community and paid newsletters.
• Advisor: a few clients who pay properly for judgment. Fractional seats and advisory retainers. More on the Advisor archetype.
• Productizer: package the work once and sell it many times. Audits, sprints, templates.
• Venture Builder: the long game. Software or a company that could be worth far more than your hours.
• Orchestrator: you build the team or system that delivers the work. Agencies and studios.

Your refusals narrow it fastest. If you won't be on camera or post publicly, drop the audience businesses. If you don't want client calls most days, services will wear you down. If you won't build software and have no technical partner, software can wait.

Time matters too. An audit can fit around a full-time job. A fractional seat needs at least a day a week, and a founder who needs you on a Tuesday afternoon. If fractional is where you're heading, read how to go fractional next.

How do you test the angle before you quit your job?

Test it with named buyers, conversations about the past and a small paid offer, before you spend a cent on a brand, a site or a product. All of it fits into a few weeks of evenings next to a job.

Name 20 companies

Write down 20 real companies that fit the buyer in your sentence, plus the name of the person who'd approve the spend. If you can't get to 20, the angle is too vague to act on or the market you can reach is too small. Both are worth knowing now.

Have 10 conversations about what already happened

Ask people how they handled this problem the last time it came up: what they tried, who they hired, what it cost and who decided. Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test is the short book I'd read first. Its core idea is simple. Ask about past behaviour and people tell you the truth. Ask about your idea and they're polite.

Leave your pitch out of these calls. Listen for their words, past spend, and whether the problem is on this quarter's list.

Ask for money with a small fixed offer

Once a few conversations confirm the problem, offer something small with a clear scope and a price. Say, a two-week pipeline diagnostic for 2,500€ that ends in a written plan. A yes gives you revenue and a reference.

"Let's talk next quarter" means the urgency isn't there yet, however warm the call felt. For the number itself, see how to price fractional and consulting work.

Read the evidence honestly

Keep going if people describe the problem before you do, they've paid for outside help on it before, and at least one person agrees to pay. Change the angle if you get lots of interest and no budget, every call turns into free advice, or buyers can't say when they'd need you.

One practical point if you're still employed: read your contract for clauses on outside work, conflicts of interest and intellectual property before you take paid work.

What mistakes should you avoid when choosing what to sell?

The first one to check is selling your job title. A title tells the buyer which seat you sat in and nothing about what changes for them. The rest are close relatives of that one.

• Selling the title. "Fractional CMO" is a category buyers understand, and that helps. On its own, it gives nobody a reason to pick you over the next profile. Attach the focus: fractional CMO for B2B SaaS companies entering the DACH market.
• Too broad. "I help B2B companies grow" covers almost everyone, so nobody sees themselves in it. If a buyer can't tell within one sentence that you mean them, they move on.
• Buyers with no budget. Pre-revenue founders, employees paying out of their own pocket, and your old team (rather than their boss) all feel the pain. Few of them can sign a retainer.
• Picking the most interesting angle over the one with proof. Start with what you can prove. Move towards the fun one once clients trust you.
• Building before selling. Months on a platform, a brand or a course before a single buyer conversation. The test above takes weeks and costs almost nothing.
• Pricing from your last salary. Dividing your old salary into a day rate ignores the time you'll spend selling, the weeks between clients, and what the problem costs the client.

Should you pick one angle or keep your options open?

Pick one angle for the next 90 days and park the rest on a list. Each angle needs its own buyer list, its own message and its own conversations. Test three at once and you end up with too little evidence on any of them.

Committing is less final than it feels. A narrow position is easy to widen once people refer you. A vague one is hard to sharpen later, because nobody remembers what you do. April Dunford makes a related point in Obviously Awesome: start from the customers who get the most value from you, and describe yourself in terms they already understand.

The order I'd follow: write three candidate angles, rank them by strength of proof and how easily the buyer can pay, and test the top one. If the evidence is weak after 10 conversations, move to number two.

If you want help getting to those three, the free Expertise Audit skill comes with the Builder Diagnostic. It runs in Claude, asks about the work you've done, and gives you your three strongest angles, each with the buyer, the problem and your proof.

Questions people ask