| One trick is to separate your skills from how you market some of them. You can remain pretty much (internally) a generalist and a tinkerer (as you are, and I am, too! but make sure not to spread yourself too thin), yet make sure to market /some/ special skills appropriately (and in very specialized/niche fashion). You'll decide which areas to market based on how you feel the market can generate recurring revenue. For instance, I'm a tinkerer, yet I have a couple of well-defined niches : - in the past, "Rails maintenance work" (easy to find, and useful while my second child was still a baby) - Ruby ETL (http://www.kiba-etl.org/) (more specialized, but very visible in my little sphere) - "SaaS bootstrapper with experience implementing products (and their billing)" - anything FinTech related (as in WiseCash & other projects) - scaling your data processing (no matter the technology, Elixir, Node, Ruby, ...) The underlying skills are all very "aligned" around products & data, yet each small niche appeals to a subset of potential clients. Hope this helps! |