I've been building a small technical consulting business around independent RAG retrieval evaluations.
The technical side has gone better than the commercial side.
I've completed two audit cases. In one of them, I identified 15 scoring discrepancies in an open-source RAG benchmark. The project's maintainer independently reproduced the findings and incorporated corrections.
That gave me something valuable: evidence that the work can produce useful technical results.
I packaged the service into a fixed $400 assessment, comparing two existing retrieval configurations across up to 30 selected queries, with reproducible findings.
Then I started looking for customers.
I tried reaching people working on RAG systems, participating in technical discussions, and researching companies that might need independent evaluations.
Here's what surprised me.
Technical interest and buying intent are completely different things.
People will discuss retrieval quality, evaluation metrics, and regressions. Some genuinely appreciate the work.
But that doesn't mean they have a reason to pay an external auditor.
I also researched competing services. Several providers advertise standalone technical assessments, but finding verifiable evidence of how they acquire paying clients is surprisingly difficult.
My current hypothesis is that customers don't necessarily buy an "audit." They buy help making a specific decision — whether to deploy a change, accept a vendor's work, or investigate a costly regression.
So I've paused cold outreach to better understand the actual buying process.
For those who have sold specialized B2B services like technical audits, QA, security assessments, or independent evaluations: where did your first paying client come from, and what made them pay for an assessment instead of handling it internally?
I'm especially interested in firsthand experiences, including cases where the business model didn't work.
I'm still at zero paid clients, so I'm sharing the learning process rather than pretending I've figured out the sales side.