Paul was "right" because he thinks about consulting like you do: as a day job without benefits. The difference between a day job and a consultancy is that your day job gets pretty upset when you hire someone to do your grunt work.

You seem dead set on scaling the wall when there's a perfectly good ladder hanging right off it. Stop killing yourself on a contract so you can earn the right to kill yourself on a startup project that will very likely fail (they all do). Engineer a solution to your current problem ("people will pay my company $8000/week to do something and I am currently the only person in my company"). That has to be easier than trying to figure out how get "liftoff" with a "1 year runway". Sheesh.