[Enginerrrd]

Pound pavement. Take people out to lunch. Go to conferences. Lots and lots of networking. Leverage any existing connections you have. If you're a senior, you should have some that are no longer relevant to your company, like old coworkers and whatnot.

In my experience, there will be about a 3-6 month delay between looking for work and securing a contract.

A couple things:

I undersold myself at first to get a couple of very pleased customers that then gave me much more work. However, it's very tricky... the customers that scoff at your price are not the ones you want. They are also going to be a PITA in every other way, and they'll grumble and make you feel like shit even when you deliver what you promised, on time, for the price you agreed to, with excellent value compared to the market. You don't want them.

....But it is a balance. Consider some way to mitigate risk on behalf of your customer in your first couple of contracts: hourly with a Not to Exceed number, or bid the job. Etc. Anything to get your foot in the door and get word-of-mouth recommendations.

Also... when pounding pavement, don't chase after individual customers! If you do, make sure they are whales. Do your best to find someone that will feed you lots of customers... Maybe partner with someone that does a complement to your work, like frontend or something of the sort?

Also... in partnerships, don't be greedy. There's ENORMOUS value that can be had when all the people you work with or around know that YOU want THEM to make money.

And finally... in my experience, having a "side gig" is really hard or impossible to pull off. It's always been a pretty binary situation between: "I have no work, nor prospects" and "Holy shit, I have way too much work and more is coming in." Work doesn't trickle in organically. You're either in or your out of the network of people that need work done, and if you're in, people paying top dollar want work done now. Trust me, those are the people you want anyway. The ones looking for a bargain will screw you.

Don't be afraid to say no to people that give you red flags, but I will warn you that every time you say "no" you are killing a connection on your network graph that could have led to a lot more work.

[ghaff]

Per another comment of mine, you're now essentially talking about a full time-ish job though. Unless you're lucky and connect with just the right people in your network, it's really tough to land well-paying part-time to very part-time gigs with a minimum of business development and a fair bit of flexibility.

And this is true broadly. It's very hard to find/make a 10-20 hour job that lets you take off a month or two and isn't some $5-10/hour sort of thing. To the degree there is, you probably have to create it yourself.

[Enginerrrd]

I totally agree.

I ended up trying to approximate this for a time by sharing work with a shop of 3 people. We were each 3 separate companies, but we would bring in clients under one contract and then just exchange labor via internal market-like exchanges. It worked pretty well for quite a while.

But even then... while it did sort of allow one to frequently (but not always) work part time and to take a couple weeks off and just distribute work with the other guys in the shop, it didn't attenuate the feast or famine issue as much as I'd hoped. In practice, 2 out of the 3 of us did the business development, and 1 guys served as the guy we could offload work onto.