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Interesting parallel, as I freelanced from September 2014 to the start of this year. I also experienced significant difficulty in finding clients, yet I ended up doing fantastic, well-paying client work - without even looking for it. The secret is code mentoring. I mentor for Bloc, Thinkful, and Codementor. Mentoring puts you in regular contact with all kinds of people who have a need to understand software. Inevitably, you'll intersect with people whose needs are more geared towards having a product than knowing exactly how to make it. It also helps that you'll be forced to work on your English and you'll make money from mentoring regardless, so you can stay afloat longer while you seek higher-value contracts. With regards to the three platforms I mentioned, I highly recommend all three, although they are all very different. Bloc pays mentors a fixed weekly rate depending on number of students and their course length (shorter = more work = more sessions = more pay). Thinkful pays an hourly rate which also applies towards reviewing student projects and helping out on message boards. Codementor lets users and mentors set up long term schedules although to me it's more of a place I go to if I need help with a framework or concept I haven't worked with enough to figure it out on my own. I don't hang out on Codementor too much but when I do (and set my status to 'available for session') I'll get various messages, sometimes from multiple people in one day. The downside there is you need to spend your first free five minutes (generally expected and built into their system) proving you know what you're talking about to a person and a codebase you've never seen before, but I've never frozen up in the past, so it's not too bad. All in all, each have their strengths and their weaknesses. Look into all three and cast a wide net. Although I'm in a great position now with client work, it took me months to get there, half the time waiting for the right student-turned-client to show up, other half waiting for the details to be hashed out before I can begin proper work. Good luck. |
edit: Just took a quick look and it is interesting to me that none of these seem to have mentors for the heavier 'corporate' languages like java or C#. Do you know of any mentoring sites for those?