Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales. (and backend paperwork as well). You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.
Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.
Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.
Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)
I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.
Getting a sql query to optimal performance is still much more of an art than a specific science. Having the LLM generate a query that appears to work (correctness issues aside), is much more likely than the LLM generating an optimal performing query. While this may not matter for one-off queries common in analytics, when you start worrying about scalability, even the tiniest tweaks can make a huge difference.
This bumps up my desire to build my own mechanical watch using one of the kits here: https://rotatewatches.com (something I've had bookmarked for a while as a possible rainy day project)
Is the only reason to create a startup to experience exponential growth and get really rich and have your own stock symbol?
Or, could someone create a lifestyle business and call that a startup? Where the goals might be simply to make a living doing what you love without working for some big company somewhere?
Or maybe could someone create a startup that makes the world a better place without concern for getting oneself crazy rich?
I am not a fan of the idea that the only driving motivation for establishing a small tech company is to make the VC's happy.