Hey, it’s Brent.

My favorite part of entrepreneurial stories is how the founder gets their first handful of customers or clients.

How they went from 0 to 1.

Previous guests have employed different methods:

• Leveraging their personal and professional network

• Partnering up with sales organizations

Today’s guest took a different approach.

True Theta founder DJ Rich was able to leverage his audience to attract clients early on…but it didn’t happen right away.

By sticking with it and tweaking his strategy, he was eventually able to start attracting clients.

Is it necessary to build an audience like this before starting a business selling your expertise?

No.

But as DJ shows, it’s an effective way to attract clients, establish authority, and charge premium rates.

Here’s DJ Rich in his own words. Check it out.

DJ Rich on starting True Theta

Tell me about True Theta. Who do you help and how do you help them?

True Theta is a machine learning consultancy. We help companies develop ML systems, whatever they may be. Since my experience is with gig economies, we do some work in market management (matching supply and demand), dynamic pricing and forecasting/planning. Also, I have a good amount of content on reinforcement learning, so I consult on how to get those systems working. That also means I advise on contextual bandits, since that’s a simple form of RL that works reliably for companies.

The ‘who’ question isn’t very well defined for me. A good number of my clients are startups, but I’ve consulted for medium sized companies as well. In general, it’s anyone who has an applied math problem who identifies me as someone who could help. In the long run, I’d like to determine a niche.

I haven’t figured out what to offer either. I started by pitching my expertise in something I knew really well (e.g. causal inference), but that didn’t produce any bites. So I’m a bit of a generalist, and I’ll do what I think delivers value.

What were you doing prior to True Theta?

I worked at Lyft as a data scientist. Before that, I worked as a quant researcher at a boutique hedge fund. I have a Master’s of Financial Engineering, but I don’t say I do much financial engineering as it’s classically defined (designing derivatives and financial products mostly).

What made you decide to strike out on your own?

I like making educational content on interesting applied math topics, but this doesn’t help your career if you’re in the tech industry. If you want to rise at a tech company, it’s better to spend those three evening hours working the job than working on your YouTube channel.

So I asked myself, what business would motivate educational content? That’s consulting because it’s also content marketing. I’ve been very happy with it so far.

Tell me about the business early on. Any crazy stories? What were your main challenges? Did you ever consider giving up?

No crazy stories really. It was just slow. No clients for the first 2-3 months, and that didn’t feel good. But I wasn’t too nervous because I knew it takes a long time to build. Also, I had gotten client interest before, since I started making educational content in 2017.

How did you get your first 3 clients?

I’m familiar with OpenAI/Perplexity API and LlamaIndex, and that was enough to get me a handful of clients from the Large Language Model craze. There’s a lot of building going on there, so it wasn’t too hard to get that contract work. Also, two of the clients were from the auto industry, where familiarity with these tools goes a lot further than in startup world. Specifically, I went to an auto conference SEMA, mentioned I could do this work and that got me the contracts. Also, I should mention I’m not investing in this type of work going further, because I don’t think it’ll be repeatable and well-paid business a few years down the line.

One of my favorite clients is Aampe. It’s founded by science-first data scientists and engineers, and they like putting out technical content. That made the relationship very natural. It got started when I posted on LinkedIn about some reinforcement learning done while I was at Lyft, and the CEO thought I could add value to his companies. 

Another source is my YouTube videos and the True Theta website. That gets me some inbound. Inbound is good, because those potential clients already decided you have the expertise they want. However, you also get more people who can’t afford the rate.

Were there any key decisions, strategies, etc. that helped you get traction with customers?

Doing more on LinkedIn and writing in general. Sadly, this was a bit of a pivot away from YouTube, but it produced more clients. Once I can figure out how to make a YouTube video in a reasonable amount of time (by outsourcing more), I expect to invest more into it.

How do you get clients now? How has your strategy evolved?

Inbound on LinkedIn is the best so far. YouTube is second. My strategy has evolved from investing into YouTube to investing in LinkedIn and my weekly blog post to TrueTheta.io. Historically, the true theta blog doesn’t produce a lot of inbound, but I have plans for guest posts and other things that I hope will get me ranking well in Google.

0% of my clients are from cold outreach. I’d say 60% are from LinkedIn and 40% are everything else (it’s hard to tell where they come from because that 40% emails me).

What do you like most about running your own business? 

Independence. I do what I think is most valuable for me and my clients everyday, and that feels good.

What do you like LEAST about running your own business? 

There’s uncertainty about how to best grow the business. Should I be writing more? Am I writing too slow? Should I just lean into YouTube? Should I give talks? Do I need to go to conferences more? Should I hire people? If so, when? Should I do government work?

I don’t have solid answers to these and there are moments when the uncertainty is bothersome. But they are rare, so I’m overall fine.

Was there a moment when you realized this was going to work?

I’m only 1 year in. I don’t think I’ve come to the moment when I’m sure this will work. I want it to, but I’m not sure. That depends on how consulting feels when I’ve done it for a long time and how it compares to the alternatives.

What’s your current business model? How do you get paid? Subscription, hours, retainer, etc? Do you have employees, partners, or subcontractors?

I work with partners (‘expert associates’, I call them) and subcontractors. No FTE’s, but I hope to have them in 2026. 

So far, I’ve done everything hourly. I’m aware of the reasons not to do that, but it’s just easier for clients to digest, and I want to start with a simple business model.

Let’s talk numbers… How much do you charge for your consulting services?

I’m going to be vague about a few things here. I’ll tell you that I charge between 250-500 an hour, depending on whether it’s advisory or engineering work and how much hour volume the project will produce. Revenue has been up and down a lot, but overall it’s growing. I can tell you I’m not making as much as I would if I went back into tech. I hope to change that, but that may take a year or more.

What advice would you give to yourself if you were just starting out? What would you do differently?

I would say focus on writing more. I wasted a lot of time doing cold outreach. Those hours would have been better just writing useful articles.

Any asks for readers? If so, how should people get in touch?

Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dj-rich-90b91753/

You can join my email list where I send out weekly articles. No spam. Just useful technical content: https://mailchi.mp/truetheta/true-theta-email-list . Here’s an example of a recent article: https://truetheta.io/concepts/reinforcement-learning/contextual-bandits/ 

Also, you might enjoy my YouTube channel Mutual Information: https://youtube.com/@mutual_information?si=N5kN9-XAvgnA7Z8G

That’s a wrap!

I hope you enjoyed this edition of data founder chronicles.

All the best,

Brent

P.S. If you know someone I should interview (or you are that someone) please reply and let me know!

P.P.S. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to get future case studies.