What does this even mean? People aren't chess pieces. Just because you walk two spaces to the left and one space forward, doesn't mean you're a knight for the rest of the time you're at the company.
Contribute to your product offering as much as you can. Participate in discussions. Talk to customers. If you're lucky, your consulting customers and your product prospects will overlap. Over time, ramp up revenue so that you can wean yourself off consulting.
This attitude that there's some status hierarchy of kinds of people in a startup is toxic. Working companies are comprised of people who will move mountains to get stuff done. You can spend tons of time pushing on the mountain of external funding, or you can push on the mountain of getting immediate and comfortable levels of cash from consulting. Both have their upsides and downsides. Either way: you're going to have to do stuff you wouldn't otherwise want to do.
What I mean is that you will be so focused and busy on the consulting piece you won't have the time to work on the product - trust me I have been there.
What I mean is that you will be so focused and busy on the consulting piece you won't have the time to work on the product - trust me I have been there.
Not necessarily. I product manage http://decalcms.com/ but don't really do much of the "actual work" on it until it's time to do a release at which point I focus a lot on the marketing.
The rest of the time I drum up business, run game on support and client queries and generally keep things ticking over.
Contribute to your product offering as much as you can. Participate in discussions. Talk to customers. If you're lucky, your consulting customers and your product prospects will overlap. Over time, ramp up revenue so that you can wean yourself off consulting.
This attitude that there's some status hierarchy of kinds of people in a startup is toxic. Working companies are comprised of people who will move mountains to get stuff done. You can spend tons of time pushing on the mountain of external funding, or you can push on the mountain of getting immediate and comfortable levels of cash from consulting. Both have their upsides and downsides. Either way: you're going to have to do stuff you wouldn't otherwise want to do.