The founder had been at it for 14 months.
Fourteen months of late nights. Two pivots. One near-death experience when their first developer ghosted mid-project. And now they were sitting across from me, exhausted, asking the question I'd heard a hundred times:
"So... what exactly would you do?"
I could have given them a PowerPoint. I didn't.
Instead, I asked: "Show me your last sprint retrospective. Show me your deployment pipeline. Show me the argument you had last week about architecture."
They paused. "Why?"
"Because that's where the real problems live. Not in strategy documents."
The Myth of the Tech Consultant
Here's what founders expect:
- Strategy decks
- Architecture diagrams
- Recommendations they'll probably ignore
- A hefty invoice
Here's what actually happens:
A good tech consultant spends the first week mostly listening. Watching. Learning where the bodies are buried.
Because every startup has wounds—technical decisions made in desperation, shortcuts taken under pressure, debt accumulated through ignorance. The consultant's job isn't to lecture. It's to find those wounds and help you heal them.
What Real Tech Consulting Looks Like
Week 1: The Investigation
I once spent a week with a SaaS startup that was "struggling to scale." Their complaint: the code was too slow, developers were burning out, and they couldn't ship features fast enough.
By day three, I'd found the real issue: their API was literally calling itself in loops. A developer had written a recursive function to "handle edge cases" and nobody had caught it in code review. Production was throttling itself into oblivion.
Fix: 4 lines of code. Result: 40% faster response times.
That's not consulting as most people imagine it. It's forensic engineering with a deadline.
Month 1: The Hard Conversations
After the obvious issues come the uncomfortable ones.
I worked with a fintech startup where the CTO (also a founder) had built most of the core system alone. The code was brilliant—in his head. Nobody else could modify it without breaking things.
The conversation went something like:
Me: "You can't keep being the single point of failure."
Him: "I know. But nobody else can work on this code."
Me: "That's exactly why it has to change."
What followed was three months of methodical knowledge transfer, documentation, and incremental refactoring. Not glamorous. Not Instagrammable. But the difference between a company that could scale and one that was permanently bottlenecked.
Ongoing: The Strategic Anchor
Once the immediate fires are out, the real value emerges.
A founder once told me: "You're the only person I can call when something technical goes wrong and I don't feel stupid asking about it."
That's the real job. Not giving answers—being the person they can think through problems with. Having someone who's seen dozens of startups make the same mistakes, who can say "I've seen this before, here's what usually works" without needing to Google it.
What Tech Consultants Actually Do
| Activity | What It Looks Like |
|---|---|
Architecture decisions | "Don't use Elasticsearch here. A simple PostgreSQL query will save you three运维 headaches." |
Technical debt audits | Finding the code that's slowing everything down and creating a safe path forward |
| Team process fixes | Removing the bottlenecks that make a 2-day task take 2 weeks |
Vendor/technology evaluation | "That tool looks great but doesn't actually do what you need. Here's a better fit." |
Scalability planning | Preparing for growth without overengineering for a future that may never come |
| Crisis management | When things break at 2 AM, having someone who can actually fix them |
Decision partnership | Being the thinking partner for technical decisions you can't afford to get wrong |
What Tech Consultants Don't Do
Let's be clear about the boundaries:
We don't write all your code. We're not a development shop. We're here to guide, review, and occasionally debug—but your team does the heavy lifting.
We don't make decisions for you. We give you the information to make better decisions. The founder's name is on the company. The calls are yours.
We don't pretend to know your business better than you do. We know technical patterns. You know your customers. Good consulting merges those.
We don't disappear after the report. A good consultant sticks around to make sure recommendations actually work.
The Difference Between Good and Bad Consulting
I've seen consultants ruin startups. Not often—but enough to know what to avoid.
Bad consulting looks like this:
- Delivering a 50-page document nobody will read
- Recommending changes that sound impressive but don't solve real problems
- Leaving after the report, never checking if implementation worked
- Using jargon to obscure the fact that they don't understand the business
Good consulting looks like this:
- Finding the actual problems (not the symptoms)
- Recommending simple solutions over impressive ones
- Staying involved until things actually improve
- Speaking in plain English because founders aren't engineers
When to Actually Hire a Tech Consultant
Here's the truth most consulting firms won't tell you: not every startup needs one.
You need a tech consultant when:
- You're making decisions that will be expensive to undo later
- Your technical team is stuck or fighting
- You have no technical background and need to evaluate what you're being told
- You're preparing for scale and want to avoid expensive mistakes
- Something is technically wrong and you can't figure out what
You probably don't need one when:
- You're pre-MVP and just need to ship something
- You have a strong technical co-founder who knows what they're doing
- Your problems are really business problems (consultants won't fix a broken product-market fit)
- You can't afford it—there are cheaper ways to get technical guidance
The Real Value
After that first founder I'd mentioned finished their 14-month struggle, I asked them what they'd gotten out of the engagement.
They said: "I sleep better now. I know what decisions matter and which ones don't. And when something goes wrong, I'm not alone figuring it out."
That's what a tech consultant actually does.
Not slides. Not architecture diagrams in pristine Lucidchart.
Just being the person who helps you make better technical decisions when it actually matters.
Need Real Technical Guidance?
At Startupbricks, we do consulting the way it should be done: embedded, practical, and focused on outcomes, not deliverables.
If you're making technical decisions that will shape your company's future, let's talk.