[jasonswett]

When I used to freelance I divided my marketing activities into two categories: "hunting" and "farming".

Hunting tactics include things like responding to job board ads, reaching out to people you know to see if they can help you find a gig, or going to a conference to try to find a new client. Like real hunting, hunting for clients can be fast, but it’s only successful a fraction of the time, and you don’t always get something good.

Farming tactics include things like writing blog posts, writing books, speaking at local meetups, speaking at conferences, guesting on podcasts, hosting podcasts, and other things that demonstrate your technical competence to a (if done successfully) large number of people. Farming can yield much better results than hunting, but there can be quite a long interval between the time you plant the seed and the time you get to reap the harvest. And just like in real farming, not all the seeds you plant will sprout into plants that bear fruit.

In my experience, farming tends to yield better clients than hunting, although you can't control when the clients are going to come.

I hate to say it but I think your safest bet is for you and your colleagues to each go your separate way (for now) and find contract gigs individually. In my experience it's really hard to find a client who wants to hire multiple people at once. The easiest kind of client to find is a software organization that needs a programmer and is willing to use a contractor rather than a full-time employee.

And BTW, the sad secret I learned about freelancing over the course of ~8 years doing it is that 99% of freelancers are just staff-aug contractors. They're not making great money and they don't have a special lifestyle. The only difference between most freelancers and regular employees is that the freelancers file 1099s instead of W-2s. Not trying to be a downer about it but I think it's helpful to acknowledge the reality of it.

Lastly, I've been asked many times how to get freelance clients, so I wrote a post about it here: https://www.jasonswett.net/my-advice-to-brand-new-freelance-...

Hope that helps.

[towelpluswater]

I'd agree. Staff aug roles for individual freelancers are always easier to find, but good luck getting a team of those unless you're a more established firm - plus, the rate and work isn't all that great. We avoid them as much as possible.

Sell project work that's strategic (ie: solving a business problem and coming with a solution), as opposed to 'We need a frontend developer for 12 months'. Better rates, opportunities to work with business instead of IT, etc.

[jasonswett]

Agreed. Although I think the reason why most freelancers sell staff aug work as opposed to what you might call "strategic project work" is that it's about 100X easier (at least in my experience) to find staff aug work.

[version_five]

The gp already alluded to it: the big difference with strategic work is you need to have the client's trust in your ability to solve their business problem, not just in your ability to code. This is why it's so hard to find, they are buying you / your team instead of just "a developer". You need to be close enough to them that they can be candid about their challenges and understand their challenges enough to provide good advice. This mostly only can happen through very strong referrals + lots of time put in getting to know the client and problem. Which is why the approach mentioned by the GP in their other comment is really the only way.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I worked in a team management/IC role at an engineering services company that tried to do staff augmentation, custom software/hardware design and their own products. I found that to be the worst of all worlds since there was a constant struggle for resources between those three "worlds." You'd get a client who had a project that was big enough to need three people, but because two of your guys were on a 1-year contract at $BIGCO, you either couldn't take on the project or had to tell the client they'd need to wait a year. At the same time, you don't make that much profit on the staff aug. to be worth it (IMO). The main attraction to staff augmentation is that you have a steady stream of income for a year or two from that placement.

However, when we stuck to our core competency in wearables/wireless devices, we had lots of return business and could complete projects more efficiently.

What I learned from the experience is that providing engineering services or freelancing can be very profitable, but you really need to specialize. Specialization allows you to become expert at doing a few things, which leads to more accurate time/effort estimates while being able to charge the same price or more (can charge a premium for being fast) as it takes you less time to complete a job. Trying to be everything to everyone, OTOH, means you're constantly churning while figuring out a brand new technology.

tl/dr:

Specialize and don't charge hourly.