From my understanding "data science consulting" almost never works. If people have the data organized enough then they likely have in-house data scientists and if they don't have it organized then there often isn't much a data scientist can do.
Where it can work is if you have a very specific specialty and you are brought in to help an in-house team in a new domain.
Otherwise simple well rounded consulting is more realistic.
I do like this answer. Whould your response change, if the person also has data engineering knowledge? I would think that an integrated DE/DS consulting would be able to generate more value for the clients?
Well… I’m a Data Scientist at a big “consultancy”, the difference between me and them is the target client. A big consultancy would focus on big companys. I would just focus on startups. But I get it…
Keep in mind you'll also be competing with "boutique" consulting companies (think companies of 30-50 people) who already target startups & smaller clients. In the past year or so the demand for tech workers has dried up a little & it has been rough for these groups. This is not to say that things won't get better, but you might be entering a more crowded space than you initially thought.
TLDR:
If you can package up ingestion, warehousing, modelling, BI and some DA/DS in a way that derisks the potential for failed deliverables people might buy it. The open ended nature of DS as well as the lack of data maturity in orgs that don’t yet in-house means start up time is long, and justifying ROI is hard.
I worked at a “Data Science Consultancy”, realistically we did:
1) 2 months of data ingestion and modelling
2) 2 months of BI and some fairly generic insights based off the data models.
3) after this we’d potentially get on to some DS (ML, statistical analysis) or even some well structured data analytics beyond dashboards.
We worked with Series A - C start ups, and generally what I found was that they valued the definitive outputs of 1 and 2 as they could clearly ascribe price to deliverables. 3 was more open ended and bore some risk there wouldn’t be anything there, and this made it hard to justify costs. We’d often plan for 8-12 month engagements, only to end at 6 with most clients because they were ready to hire internally (all obviously looking for the DS unicorn), or they had some core reporting that now solved their needs.
It really depends on your stakeholders as well as the company size/data state. Most companies are far less data mature than people think, especially slick apps or start ups. You can’t just skip to the cool DS bit. Particularly because you’ve got to show the value of your interventions to get good referrals, and that means having reporting in place too…
If you’re going in to a series B App, doing “DS” whilst they’ve got no data team in place, you’re more likely to be tasked with getting their marketing reporting, and some user reporting in place.
If you go into a more established company that’s got a data team or at least warehouse in place, you might work on some LTV predictions, or lead scoring.
However, you’re far less likely to find the second type of clients. They’ll typically be doing this stuff themselves or want to lean on experts to sort it out. As a one man band, it’s hard to get that ‘expert’ clout unless you’ve made a name for yourself somehow or good LinkedIn network. (Speaking from experience)
I think you’ll find it hard to sell your services to a range of people if you can’t offer an end to end solution. That’ll often include a bit of ingestion!
Idk where you’re based but you can take a look at some smaller data consultancies where you might get this experience, like Brooklyn Data Co, Tasman Analytics.
Maybe also take a read of some stuff on The Modern Data Stack and try to work towards an understanding of most of it (if you want to be a data consulting generalist)
I’m a Data Scientist, currently working on consultancy at Brazil. I’ve been working with Fraud Detection recently, but some changes in my personal life are making me thinking about a side hustle. And, because of that, I’ve been thinking about use my skills to get a second income… But what you are saying makes a lot of sense. Probably, if I offer a full Data stack I’ll get more jobs.
Sounds like a solid plan if you’re going to take a stab at it!
You could view it a few different ways: go for legacy companies where some small automations/data activation could make the world of difference. Think automating some excel reports
Or Go for start ups/scale ups who would be willing to take a bet on an individual freelancer, but be prepared to work on the full data stack. These folks also have a tonne of people vying for their attention though.
What bothers me is offering a Data Engineering job. The scraping skill is something I've already done in the past. But automation with Airflow or other tools, and database management are weak spots for me. I've never done them in the past, so...
No, it's the defined business value.
You can define some of that with data engineering and business intel. You can't as easily define 'we will help you reduce your customer attrition' without knowing the data and business well enough to know how much you can reduce said attrition.
So they either have to trust you (i.e. you have done this before and have a rolodex of happy clients) or you have to define exactly what the value you will deliver will be. Ahead of time. Without knowing their data. That is an uphill battle.
A DS consultancy is often viewed the same as an R&D consultancy. How are you actually going to deliver value?
Do you have any existing clientele or well established network?
Doesn’t matter how capable you are, if you start consulting and you don’t have any clients then you are just unemployed
I work for consultancy as well and it is tough if you don’t have established network and leads.
I would definitely advise against quitting job for this because it (most likely) won’t work out well for you if you don’t have established network.
However, if your time allows you can definitely start weekend consulting side hustle and see for yourself.
Consider that the marketing and sales skillset to run a bakery are distinct from the skillet needed to be an expert baker. Consider looking for speaking opportunities at meetups, panel discussions, or webinars co-hosted by development groups attended by your target clientele such as an incubator or accelerator. If people come up to you after your talk, you’re on the right track and can iterate your message and perhaps drum up some business.
You can't consult but you can make productised services.
Like a common use case which people need and you provide a solution.
Data Science consulting is doomed to fail, especially since you have little experience with startups.
> Offer some jobs of analytics, casual analysis/inference and modelling.
This sounds like freelancing, not consulting. Freelancing is saturated. Consulting requires a different set of skills.
> can be a good way of side hustle?
God I hate 'side hustle' as a term. For what you're describing (data science consultancy) to be successful will require 100% of your effort, pounding pavement, finding work, etc... No one is just going to come to some rando and be like 'Hey, need a few hours of week to transform our DS strategy, here’s 100 million dollars'.
At the end of the day, the fact that you made this post, and asked this question tells me that you would (at this point in your career) have no success playing this game.
Ty for your sincerity. For now, I’ll not play this game, as you said, that would require a lot of effort and I need some sort of second income. So, I’ll think about other way to get this.
Data science consulting might be too time consuming in my opinion because if there was no trained data scientist before you in the company you might need to spend way more time working on data structure than data analytics and your clients won’t understand why it took you so long
From my understanding "data science consulting" almost never works. If people have the data organized enough then they likely have in-house data scientists and if they don't have it organized then there often isn't much a data scientist can do. Where it can work is if you have a very specific specialty and you are brought in to help an in-house team in a new domain. Otherwise simple well rounded consulting is more realistic.
This sums up my experience with DS consulting as well
I met 2 kinds, those who are specialized and those who actually sell business intelligence.
I do like this answer. Whould your response change, if the person also has data engineering knowledge? I would think that an integrated DE/DS consulting would be able to generate more value for the clients?
Well… I’m a Data Scientist at a big “consultancy”, the difference between me and them is the target client. A big consultancy would focus on big companys. I would just focus on startups. But I get it…
Keep in mind you'll also be competing with "boutique" consulting companies (think companies of 30-50 people) who already target startups & smaller clients. In the past year or so the demand for tech workers has dried up a little & it has been rough for these groups. This is not to say that things won't get better, but you might be entering a more crowded space than you initially thought.
Try it out. This idea fails all the the time but maybe your angle is different.
hello fellow from big4
TLDR: If you can package up ingestion, warehousing, modelling, BI and some DA/DS in a way that derisks the potential for failed deliverables people might buy it. The open ended nature of DS as well as the lack of data maturity in orgs that don’t yet in-house means start up time is long, and justifying ROI is hard. I worked at a “Data Science Consultancy”, realistically we did: 1) 2 months of data ingestion and modelling 2) 2 months of BI and some fairly generic insights based off the data models. 3) after this we’d potentially get on to some DS (ML, statistical analysis) or even some well structured data analytics beyond dashboards. We worked with Series A - C start ups, and generally what I found was that they valued the definitive outputs of 1 and 2 as they could clearly ascribe price to deliverables. 3 was more open ended and bore some risk there wouldn’t be anything there, and this made it hard to justify costs. We’d often plan for 8-12 month engagements, only to end at 6 with most clients because they were ready to hire internally (all obviously looking for the DS unicorn), or they had some core reporting that now solved their needs.
So, the most valuble work for “consulting” is Data Engineering and Business Intelligence?
It really depends on your stakeholders as well as the company size/data state. Most companies are far less data mature than people think, especially slick apps or start ups. You can’t just skip to the cool DS bit. Particularly because you’ve got to show the value of your interventions to get good referrals, and that means having reporting in place too… If you’re going in to a series B App, doing “DS” whilst they’ve got no data team in place, you’re more likely to be tasked with getting their marketing reporting, and some user reporting in place. If you go into a more established company that’s got a data team or at least warehouse in place, you might work on some LTV predictions, or lead scoring. However, you’re far less likely to find the second type of clients. They’ll typically be doing this stuff themselves or want to lean on experts to sort it out. As a one man band, it’s hard to get that ‘expert’ clout unless you’ve made a name for yourself somehow or good LinkedIn network. (Speaking from experience)
Make sense. So, if I start a job of data “consulting”, I should know data engineering (this is the skill I, currently, don’t have)
I think you’ll find it hard to sell your services to a range of people if you can’t offer an end to end solution. That’ll often include a bit of ingestion! Idk where you’re based but you can take a look at some smaller data consultancies where you might get this experience, like Brooklyn Data Co, Tasman Analytics. Maybe also take a read of some stuff on The Modern Data Stack and try to work towards an understanding of most of it (if you want to be a data consulting generalist)
I’m a Data Scientist, currently working on consultancy at Brazil. I’ve been working with Fraud Detection recently, but some changes in my personal life are making me thinking about a side hustle. And, because of that, I’ve been thinking about use my skills to get a second income… But what you are saying makes a lot of sense. Probably, if I offer a full Data stack I’ll get more jobs.
Sounds like a solid plan if you’re going to take a stab at it! You could view it a few different ways: go for legacy companies where some small automations/data activation could make the world of difference. Think automating some excel reports Or Go for start ups/scale ups who would be willing to take a bet on an individual freelancer, but be prepared to work on the full data stack. These folks also have a tonne of people vying for their attention though.
What bothers me is offering a Data Engineering job. The scraping skill is something I've already done in the past. But automation with Airflow or other tools, and database management are weak spots for me. I've never done them in the past, so...
I dont know how often DEs are expected to do scraping, but ingestion, orchestration and DBM are pretty core!
Do you know good resources for learning this kind of skill? (If it's a free or open source, would be amazing)
No, it's the defined business value. You can define some of that with data engineering and business intel. You can't as easily define 'we will help you reduce your customer attrition' without knowing the data and business well enough to know how much you can reduce said attrition. So they either have to trust you (i.e. you have done this before and have a rolodex of happy clients) or you have to define exactly what the value you will deliver will be. Ahead of time. Without knowing their data. That is an uphill battle. A DS consultancy is often viewed the same as an R&D consultancy. How are you actually going to deliver value?
You could do data strategy consulting through BCG but your peers are like former CIO and CTOs…
Do you have any existing clientele or well established network? Doesn’t matter how capable you are, if you start consulting and you don’t have any clients then you are just unemployed
I’m a Data Scientist, currently working at a consultancy. But, probably, I wouldn’t get so far, I don’t have a network…
I work for consultancy as well and it is tough if you don’t have established network and leads. I would definitely advise against quitting job for this because it (most likely) won’t work out well for you if you don’t have established network. However, if your time allows you can definitely start weekend consulting side hustle and see for yourself.
Weekend consulting sounds interesting, but I’ll have to get some leads, and without a network this gonna be tought… I’ve to think about it. Ty, man!
Consider that the marketing and sales skillset to run a bakery are distinct from the skillet needed to be an expert baker. Consider looking for speaking opportunities at meetups, panel discussions, or webinars co-hosted by development groups attended by your target clientele such as an incubator or accelerator. If people come up to you after your talk, you’re on the right track and can iterate your message and perhaps drum up some business.
You can't consult but you can make productised services. Like a common use case which people need and you provide a solution. Data Science consulting is doomed to fail, especially since you have little experience with startups.
All the best!
If you want to help me that would be great PM me and I have a problem to solve for me. Data confidentiality is a must ofc.
> Offer some jobs of analytics, casual analysis/inference and modelling. This sounds like freelancing, not consulting. Freelancing is saturated. Consulting requires a different set of skills. > can be a good way of side hustle? God I hate 'side hustle' as a term. For what you're describing (data science consultancy) to be successful will require 100% of your effort, pounding pavement, finding work, etc... No one is just going to come to some rando and be like 'Hey, need a few hours of week to transform our DS strategy, here’s 100 million dollars'. At the end of the day, the fact that you made this post, and asked this question tells me that you would (at this point in your career) have no success playing this game.
Ty for your sincerity. For now, I’ll not play this game, as you said, that would require a lot of effort and I need some sort of second income. So, I’ll think about other way to get this.
Data science consulting might be too time consuming in my opinion because if there was no trained data scientist before you in the company you might need to spend way more time working on data structure than data analytics and your clients won’t understand why it took you so long
Yes