| A good way to get started is not to ask "How do I become a freelancer/consultant" but rather "what valuable business outcomes can I deliver with my technical skills" and then find clients who have those problems and solve them. Yes, this ignores the hard part of "finding those clients". I know people with expertise in improving website performance, for example, and the mindset shift here is not to think about response times but rather improvement in conversion rates, decrease in shopping cart abandonment rate, etc. Clients don't really care about caching or asset preloading but they really, really care about squeezing the extra dollar from their website visitors. Help them make that extra dollar and you get to keep some portion of it. Once you establish this foundation, getting to the right clients is easier than if you put yourself out there advertising "will write Python code for $$$". So for instance, I wouldn't necessarily attend technical conferences / meetups but perhaps conferences where, I don't know, ecommerce website operators discuss issues that are critical to them. Those are your potential clients who can be perceptive to the right pitch. I think that technical conferences are a better fit if you're looking for a job and selling your resume. Having said all of this, when I started out as a freelance dev, I did use Upwork to get some experience and reviews that I could later repurpose as testimonials on my website. There's nothing wrong with hands-on freelance coding to get started somehow. It can be hard to define what specific business outcomes I could deliver with technical skills/existing resume, so getting some real-world experience can help with refining that. Always be on a lookout for that answer: once you understand "why" your clients keep paying you (hint: not for the code itself), you can find your niche and improve your sales pitch. Finally: yes, it's critical to get out there and connect with people! Be it on LinkedIn, email, forums, Discords: you won't get clients unless you talk to people. Talking to past connections could also be a good way to find contract opportunities esp. if you've kept in touch over the years. Being a solo dev/consultant is 80% people work and only 20% technical work. PS There's another way: you can ignore all of the above and apply to contract jobs (1099) using recruiters to get to clients. That's very similar to employment (clients tend to treat you just like staff) but you can potentially get better rates. I've been doing this for years with "success" but frankly, it's only marginally better than employment plus you get no benefits like vacation days etc. Real, actual consulting/freelance work can be a lot more satisfying if you can make it work! |