I was able to do two small websites at $5k per + $3.5k in design consulting in a month. It's not $20k but I also wasn't killing myself either. It wouldn't be easy, but it's certainly attainable.
I think the bigger issue here is that $20k is insignificant. If you've already got a full-time job and you're working on this venture as a side-hustle you don't need the $20k. If you're working on this venture full-time and it's your only gig you'll need more than $20k. So I'm not entirely sure where this model fits.
One of the website gigs was from the monthly seeking freelancer post here on HN.The two other leads came through dribbble.com (this was nearly a year ago now). The landing part was pretty easy. Just sent my offer and they accepted.
I once did a code review for $3,500 and it took about 8-12 hours. After I was done, they asked me to fix the few bugs I found. I told them I was super busy (which I was) and they offered me $10,000 to do the work ASAP. Since it would only take me 8 or so hours to fix the bugs I could hardly pass it up. For two days of work I walked away with $13,500 dollars, of course there is also tax on that, so I netted like $9,000.
Depending how hard I/you try to find consulting work, you can totally make 20k, of course it depends on the month. The best part, is that you can write off business expenses on your taxes. So, you pay significantly less (if any) tax on that 20k.
If you join a bunch of the freelance marketplaces it's really not hard. I literally receive offers for jobs every day or so, most aren't that good, but probably once every month or two it is as described.
The problem is, I have no idea going in if a code review is going to be easy, or if the bugs are easy to fix. That's somewhat just luck.
> If you join a bunch of the freelance marketplaces it's really not hard
Hmm I've always heard the exact opposite. I haven't seen a freelance type of marketplace that isn't a huge race to the bottom. Whenever I've done consulting it's always been through contacts that I know; I've never found a way to actually make decent money through other means.
You do a few jobs on the cheapish, and quite often they will recommend you. Like I said, most of my jobs are through people finding me through various other projects. Contacts, like you said.
This sounds a lot like gloating. I'm sure a lot of us would like to find consulting work but don't really have an inkling as to where to find it. It feels like more of a matter of knowledge / networking rather than how hard one tries.
I did C/C++ tutoring, and did freelance work on both OpenCV and Qt projects. I get offers from the people I tutored, being active on forums, multiple freelance networks, and having an active github.
It wasn't supposed to be gloating, it was more - it's not as hard as you think.
Be active on projects on github related to areas you are interested in (i.e. Rails, Node) or elsewhere. Also, there are plenty of freelance market places.
Protip: Have a high bill rate and work in a niche but critical area.
I've spent 20+ years helping people designing, build & move entire datacenters. Migration of one or two servers is easy. It's exponentially harder when you have to move hundreds or thousands of servers running many apps with minimal downtime.
Still not sure how I ended up specializing in this but there was a need and still is. Turns out a lot of that experience is still applicable for customers moving to the cloud =)
I think the bigger issue here is that $20k is insignificant. If you've already got a full-time job and you're working on this venture as a side-hustle you don't need the $20k. If you're working on this venture full-time and it's your only gig you'll need more than $20k. So I'm not entirely sure where this model fits.