Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.

Still working with them 6 years later.

I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!

Be nice on the internet, I guess.

https://thebusinessofauthority.com/

programming language forums are good when they are growing and there is more demand than can be satisfied. i was in a group like that and it worked well for a while.

i think potentially small business forums should be good. a least when i want to target small businesses.

any recommendations or other suggestions?

Targeting small businesses can be good and fun, for a variety of reasons. It's just... small business mean everything from rivet manufacturers to real estate agents. The more generalised you are, the less you can set yourself apart.

The more focused you are, the more you begin to understand your market / audience - what matters to them, common problems, financial cycles, the overall network etc - the better you can serve them (including making actual products for them). This creates a positive feedback loop... over a long period of time. Years, probably (at least it was for me. I started from scratch in the web dev space, it's taken about 4 years to get to a 'good' financial position with nice clients).

I've begun specialising in web-tech-for-hardware (so not embedded, but web tech focused around accessing, commissioning, controlling embedded devices by non-engineers), and providing the supporting software for those (web apps with serial support, manufacturing test systems, in-field mobile apps to access & setup devices when there's no internet). It's niche, but I thought it was a good field because I also like UI/UX design, and I felt it's something embedded engineers aren't great at.

I originally started my career in the embedded space (before taking a detour into the business world), so I guess it gave me enough of a leg up to understand just enough parlance to talk shop. Not enough to really build anything, but to know what UART or I2C are, to know to poke fun at PLCs, the difficulty with soldering LGA/BGAs, why performance and low power matter, etc etc. This builds trust... but that's a by-product. I genuinely enjoy the space and like the people, so I guess that comes across too.

Maybe instead of focusing on a technical field, if you're interested in helping small businesses, see if they have any industry groups or bodies you can join + conferences you can attend. Be the guy in the room that has the skills they don't have. There might be lots of more competent engineers out there (certainly true for me), but in my case I'm the only guy I know that's willing to be in _this_ particular space.

My advice would be to differentiate yourself:

- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.

- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.

- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you

I endorse this. I've been doing generalist consulting for about six years, and I love flying solo. I've been successful in landing some big customers and interesting projects, but I'm tired of the inefficiency that comes with being a generalist, so I've decided to specialize vertically.

I had a super-interesting project in executive search in the last couple years, and I've decided to settle around that area: executive search and recruitment firms. Maybe later, as an extension I'll target other B2B, relationship-driven professional service firms tha share a common core of processes.

I've only recently pivoted but I'm already starting to see the fruits. It's commercially efficient. Many potential customers seem happy to open the door and chat. I know where to find them, online and off. And then it's operationally efficient. I'm confident I could jump on a customer project and recognize most of their processes and systems immediately and have a quick impact. I already have a base of IP (documented business procedures, code, etc.) and only intend to grow it in the coming years and even turn it into a "productized service".

I think people refuse to specialize for three main reasons. The first is for lack of a clear thesis. That's fine, you need to explore for a bit. The second is for a fear of lack of opportunities, which is often unfounded. The third is due to psychological reasons related to the image of self. On this last one I can only advise that (a) even in specialization there is way more variety than you think, (b) you can always keep growing as a generalist with side projects and self-directed learning and (c) nothing is ever fixed in stone, everything is in flow - you can always pivot out into other interesting directions.

how do i find what those are?

i see the point, but i don't find developing for one specific tool very appealing.

From GP comment: “either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one.”

Yes, the parent was referring to technical specialization. But my point is either works. Especially in the context of what OP is trying to do which is "automation" - technically very broad.

One place hired me thinking I could fix some software they farmed out to India. I was not aware of that when they hired me. Afterwards they said they wanted it fixed in two weeks and fired me when I told them it wasn't possible. The software was in a language I'd never used on hardware I never programmed for.

They hired someone locally who was something of an expert in the area who claimed he could fix it in a month. It took him six months to fix the problems.

Lesson of hiring cheap overseas.

They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.

Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.

Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.

This is why cold outreach is rarely effective. Until you’ve seen it, you don’t realize the volume of incoming freelancing pitches coming from all of the freelancers. It’s getting worse with AI automation, now.

Any real networking at all will set you apart. It has to be more than sending someone a LinkedIn request because that’s what all of the other agencies are doing too. You have to establish yourself as a real and trusted person.

If you manage to make the outreach warmer, it can work surprisingly well. I built a tool to identify high-intent leads on LinkedIn which gets me acceptance rates of 60%+ by finding people that comment on relevant content to my niche: https://www.getibex.com

I don't consult anymore, but for an extended period I did so at a premium rate and as an independent. I remember a hiring manager's boss saying something to me like "I could get 2 or more consultants for the same money" and I replied, " I don't really see myself as competing with those organizations, but if you can get the job done it makes sense to take that path." It was both cocky and true (not sure today-me would say that). The thing I understood well was that differentiating as a skilled individual makes you much harder to displace; there are countless "$TECH programmer with N years of experience in $FOOBAR" while there are very few "$YOU".

Or one vertical, or space. IE: you act as a CTO for companies that are in manufacturing but are a liiitle to small to hire someone.

Any suggestions to what that could be?

I'm a backend developer looking to specialize in something with a clear demand.

Top-of-the-head ideas are things like: Kubernetes, Postgres, Caddy, Self-hosting, Go or Google Cloud

Obviously, one has to try to gauge the demand before spending too much time on it

I'm a web developer / designer-lite (amongst other things in previous lives), and have embedded myself as the web-tech guy for an embedded / hardware team. I help provide better customer facing interfaces (through websites, apps, etc) to both end users and manufacturer that the company uses.

I've made small, simple tools that can be packaged up along in a device's flash (it's ~2KB), that allows a user to interrogate the device via serial, capture all the commands + responses, & trivially email them to an engineer. It's designed for troubleshooting devices remote, without needing to ship JLink's or debuggers or what not to clients. It's a very small thing, but it's cool to hear people using it to help troubleshoot with users, in a way that's much simpler than trying to jump on the phone with them & guess what they're seeing on their screen.

I also specifically help make manufacturing test systems which sit closer to a web-app like experience (in terms of usability and visuals), because I've observed that providing end-of-line manufacturing staff with poorly cludged together test systems leads to a bunch of errors which don't need to exist (they're often just quickly thrown together CLIs, which are unpleasant to use and buggy all round - especially for less tech savvy manufacturing staff).

I also happen to really like embedded engineers, they're fun to hang around with - and I get genuine satisfaction out of being able to help them out in areas they haven't specialised in.

Yeah, I think that is good advice. You just need "an in", somewhere to start.

I don't think there are many actual experts though, experts as in the people your developers call when they can't figure it out themselves. But the marked is probably small-ish, and there's a large effort to become a real expert.

Usually experts are T shaped. Acquiring expertise always means the time spent is away from learning something else.

The deeper and greater the expertise the more niche the topic usually becomes and the less demand there is.

The world might need X million web developers but how many experts are there in browser technology. Or even experts in that domain something more niche like rendering or rendering niche like Angle and WebGL..you already go this deep and it boils down to a handful of individuals.

Also I didn't say that there would not be demand just that many businesses are not willing to pay for it anymore. Industry layoffs, AI are huge leverages that any potential employer can use to have all the advantage when negotiating compensation.

E.g., a web developer who knows a lot about how lawyers run their business.

Opus is far better at most surface-level tasks than it is at tasks that require deep knowledge and understanding of domains; someone who is a complete generalist (who thus has only surface level knowledge in many, many things) is far more replaceable with LLMs than someone who has deep knowledge in one.

Consider the way LLMs actually are created; they are not created from billions of repos with deep knowledge behind them. The majority of their knowledge comes from a massive amount of surface-level work that's been done and can be sampled from: React starter templates, starter templates + what little customization someone needed, blog-tutorial-level stuff.

There must be a word for this style of post where you take your own inadequacies and fears and project them on to others?

It's indisputable (borderline tautological) that specialization trades breadth for depth. This (obviously?) implies the risk of targeting a narrower market, and the upside of being more attractive to that smaller population. It's a typical "quality over quantity" tradeoff.

To say there's no "sliver of truth" in pointing that out (let alone w/ an unwarranted jab about projecting fears) is... strange and maybe hypocritical. TLDR your response came across as emotional and passive-aggressive, and confusing.

I do not necessarily agree with this as stated. A specialist will have access to many roles within their speciality that are not open to a generalist. The market for generalists without deep expertise is also extremely crowded.

My first clients came through a friend who connected me with people that needed someone to maintain a mobile app and its backoffice. Thats it. No cold outreach, no fancy strategy, just someone who knew what I could do and made the intro. I think most engineers underestimate how much work comes from just telling people around you what you do.

For getting more visibility I started writing about what I'm building on LinkedIn, sharing technical decisions, things I got wrong. People reach out from that. Not a flood but enough

One thing I'd warn about: consulting can eat your whole schedule if you let it. I had to put hard boundaries around my consulting hours because my own product was getting zero attention. Now I treat consulting as the thing that pays the bills while I build the thing I actually care about. If you dont set that boundary early you wake up in 2 years running a consultancy you never wanted.

A “hey I noticed x is costing you more than it should and could be better/cheaper done like this” AND then actually give them the “this” for free without expectation of anything in return is 10x more effective than a message where you’re asking for work.

It doesn’t need to be a big give - an actionable plan for a small system improvement they can give to someone internal to implement, for example, is fine.

Another tip is to highlight the problem with a loom video/recording of some sort. That way they’ve seen and heard you too. This builds instant trust and a feeling of knowing the person behind the business straight away.

Good luck!

Can you give a more specific example from your recent experience?

Put bluntly, I design it so I can't lose, and neither can my client. I design it so even in an adversarial, zero trust environment, the relationship and arrangement still makes sense.

In practice this looks like, I do a bit of work up front, ship a demo within the first week, if they're happy, they pay, it becomes theirs, and we continue working together.

I also choose projects I actually like, and that align with my goals, so even if I get hosed, I had fun and learned cool things. (But keeping milestones small minimizes the cost of getting hosed, for both parties :)

Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.

On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.

Happy to have a chat if you drop me an email.

Took about 6 weeks to get 5 reviews. Before that I was competing on rate against people charging $15/hr and it was miserable. After the reviews landed I bumped from $70 to $95 and nobody pushed back. The reviews changed the entire dynamic of the conversation.

Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building. What are your differentiators? (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.

Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge. There are whole schools of materials to help with this.

Lastly remember you are trading your time for money. Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing. You may need liability insurance as well. With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make. Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself. (Side note: "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)

I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.

One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.

That said. When staying in a job skill atrophy is a very real thing.

As nassim talen would say, it is less risky to be a contractor.

- [20 Lessons for Attracting, Signing, and Retaining Great Clients](https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/service-business)([archive](https://archive.is/B0bWG))

- [How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor](https://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant/) ([archive](https://archive.is/iun16))

- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...) ([archive](https://archive.is/STvcv))

- [The Strategic Independent](https://tomcritchlow.com/strategy/) ([archive](https://archive.is/O5OKC))

- [A retiring consultant’s advice on consultants](https://www.economist.com/business/2023/08/17/a-retiring-con...) ([archive](https://archive.is/Slqwj))

- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients)([archive](https://archive.ph/kBPDL))

My favourite was helping scientists - not the highest paying gigs, but the most interesting work and sometimes it led to great ongoing relationships as their go to tech person.

I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting, and after that, they go into paid discovery at a lower rate than your full rate, out of which they get a technical persons documentation of the problem to solve. This approach definitely worked the best for me in the long run.

that is still a freebie, though, by definition. if you offer anything for free, it is a freebie.

and, offering a freebie does not necessarily signal desperation. i am not saying that one should not offer freebies, or even that one should. it all depends. and many variations are possible.

For example, escrow, via a services marketplace.

Things I learned:

- Get an accountant ASAP, even if the income is small. Just the peace of mind that my taxes were being filed correctly was worth the cost.

- You don't need a perfect solution from the start, you are working with your client towards something they can use.

- You need to stay on top of things and communicate regularly, even if your client doesn't.

- Almost all clients wanted me to either come work for them or sell all (rights of) my work to them. This is understandable from their side, but if you want to stay independent you need to set some boundaries.

you have to tell them that they have to communicate regularly too. otherwise, how can business be done. how can issues be sorted out. they will blame you for the issues later, although they did not discuss them with you. aka cya syndrome.

if they continue not to do it, you should fire them. or use reverse signoff protocol.

"we mutually agreed at the start of this engagement, that if you don't sign off on acceptance of a given deliverable within x days, it is understood that you have accepted it and will pay for it".

If it happens more than once, leave them. it indicates they don't take you seriously.

all such terms should be put in the contract, initially.

if they don't agree to such mutually protective terms, don't sign the contract at all.

Negotiate a kill fee for the contract too.

The kill fee idea, I got from this video:

"fuck you, pay me" by mike monteiro

https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U

In the time before COVID and up until its end, the tech market was booming, but when the economic stimulus ended and interest rates rose, the tech market shrank and the freelance market in Berlin/Germany (and probably Denmark too) has never really recovered. The positions simply aren't there, only very few that many fight over. The great thing about being a freelancer before was that you were almost treated like a rock star, recruiters contacted you all the time, and you could pick and choose.

If you don't have a large network, you can try signing up with different recruiters and see what they have to offer. You might be lucky if you live in regions with less competition and where clients are looking for someone local to work on-site. Getting hired these days also requires that you have (substantial) experience and can show some projects.

(By the way, I’m looking for a permanent position—preferably in Copenhagen—as the bank requires this to approve my loan application. Here is my resume just in case: https://lasse.sometechblog.com/)

https://theconsensus.dev/contribute.html

It also helps if you could show either/both:

* a portfolio / clients you've worked with

* open source / "street-cred"

When I was looking for projects I always attach my Github profile (https://github.com/fredwu) to show my open source contributions, and also the SaaS products I've built myself (https://wuit.com/), and if clients are looking for C-level / strategic-level help, I also attach my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/), these help build up your reputation and stand out amongst many freelancers also looking for projects.

I just had a very quick glance at your site - there seems to be a lot of text, mostly focused on what you can offer. But what's missing is... who are you? What have you done?

The portfolio/OSS combo is key because it removes risk. Clients can see what you actually ship, not just what you claim. Even small open source contributions help more than you'd expect.

One thing missing: referrals. Your first few clients are the hardest. But if you do good work, they'll refer others. That becomes your growth engine pretty quickly, so don't treat early clients as one-offs.

The friction on the first paid project wasn't finding the client. It was eliminating the need for them to take a risk on me, because they could see I'd been producing at that caliber for a year. The market caught up to the identity, not the other way around.

how do you do that? how do you get the details about the company for that? i look at company websites, i usually only find marketing stuff but not really anything useful to tell me what's inside.

Turned out, their pageviews were simular but not costs, so they made me the CTO to optimize.

Since pretty much everyone was freelancer in this business, I had to turn full-time freelance.

Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)

For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.

Just my $0.02 of course, circumstances may vary

OS/2 consulting

It all started when I made a connection through a OS/2 community post asking for help on some CNC equipment running OS/2, and it turned out that they were fairly local to me, so I now have an occasional source of income in the form of troubleshooting and debugging OS/2 boxes.

I’m slowly building up contacts to do more. This isn’t ever going to entirely replace my normal 9 to 5, but it’s really good side work and gives me something to do.

You will become tool agnostic. you will see to the end. you will find tools to do it.

So a good way to go independent is to go into a consultancy based business - you will get a feel for AR, AP, contracts and so forth in a way that you won't really often see at a service provider, ISP, software company or SaaS tech company.

Also, never, ever work for free. One, your time is worth more than you think. Second, it makes you sound a bit less serious and less valuable and you will attract clients that are not fun to work with. Not worth your time at all. The only people who MAYBE should be working for free are students who are in high school.

I have been freelancing on and off on the side for the past 8 years and this year pulled the plug and going full time on it and tbh I am now oversubscribed. So, there's definitely a need for it.

My first few clients (8 years ago) were through posting on reddit (/r/forhire) and then also on the monthly HN freelancer thread (was shocked they stopped doing that, I have gotten 2 solid clients from those!).

once I was comfortable I am fairly indispensible part of the business I submitted my resignation along with an offer to continue working as an independent contractor which was swiftly accepted. once I got this first (and as steady as it gets) thing everything went much smoother after this, word of mouth mostly and I went to a lot of meetups (especially pre covid) from where I got a number of contracts too

People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.

1. Embrace the bizarre. You need your first client, not a repeatable go to market motion. Once you have a client, you can begin to work on getting clients and figuring out what type of work you want to do longer-term. My first client was a friend who owned a business, knew enough about technology to scratch the surface and was willing to pay $5k for me to coach him. He had to write all the code and I agreed to monthly coaching until he was able to get his site in production. Terrible economics but earned real money and that’s the point of your first client - it legitimizes you. 2. Tell true stories. Did you meet with a prospect yesterday? It’s much more compelling to open your conversation about something real that happened instead of words on a page. Your website looks like every other AI consulting website. No shade, mine does too. Website is unlikely to be a major source of business. Don’t lie to yourself that adding features to your site is investing in your business growth until you are getting new leads from it. 3. The question you should be asking is how do I get my 2nd, 3rd and 4th clients because otherwise you have just traded being an employee with benefits for ‘freedom’ and utter dependence on your single client. Again, embrace all the strategies. My 2nd client came from responding to an RFP - something I’d never done in my career. 3rd client came from a referral from 2nd client. 4th client came from a friend who knew I did tech and need some help to bring a project to life. None of it makes sense in hindsight, but the point is that you learn by doing. Every client teaches you something about the type of business you want to become.

Bonus tip: read books. Not because they have the formula that you will use, but because they have the best ideas written down. Some combination of those ideas is likely your path to success. Reading books has far greater return than shorter forms (social media and dare I say HN comments). Bizarrely, the most impactful book I read is one called The Prosperous Coach which is about an entirely different business system than anything I do.

I don’t generally think RFPs are a good fit (we’ve filed out a few since and haven’t seen much response). If you can get RFP with a relationship then you might have a chance.

There’s lots of aggregators (sam.gov for example) but I’d recommend your local jurisdictions (city, county, state) - check their websites and see if any proposals fit your style. Often, locals get preferential consideration.

But mainly, a lot of things accumulated. I am 40 now, with two kids, the second - 6 months old. When she is 20, I will probably need to use daipers for elderly people. And she needs proper education.

AI is changing the world, and being a software developer might not be a safe long-term position anymore.

With my, almost 20 years of professional experience, as a software developer contractor, seeing a lot of project, I just felt confident enough to try. Let's see how it will go :)

I will you all the best in your journey :)

60 really isn’t that old

From there, I found a few clients through that one original client, and later in my career they came from colleagues I'd worked with when during periods when I had a "real" job.

I get paid whether I’m on vacation, on the bench, full benefits, etc.

They take care of finding projects, chasing down payments, sales, marketing and I get paid…decently.

Every time I think about going independent - and I have a decent network and great credentials for my specialty - the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze. I get to focus on leading projects and not have to worry about the surrounding work.

Then, out of the blue, a client - a Belgian space company - contacted us with a project request to serve as a sub-contractor of theirs. The scope was sall, budget was $25,000 and it lifted up our spirits enormously. They had found us with a LinkedIn search, and told us we were the only company in Europe to offer what we did.

It was not directly what our start-up was about, but we balanced the risk of being seen as distracted by investors against the opporunity that investors could see that we can earn real money from real customers. Sadly, the budget ended up being too small to include the required travel for regular site visits as well as the code to be developed, so we asked to exit the project early. We would never have thought to talk to a space company because we considered our technology early stage; but we learned the space sector is very open minded, because most of what they do, they do for the first time.

Most enterprises that need consultants are using Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, Dynamics, etc. If a company has an engineering department to build and run internal software, they very rarely need a consultant. And if they don't, they are very unlikely to higher a consultant to build it custom. They'd want "out of the box" because they think (often incorrectly these days), it will be easier to maintain.

Also you don't have to do the sales work yourself and they find suitable customers for you etc, it's totally worth the price especially if you are just starting

But that was back in 2013, the market has completely changed and I don't even do consulting anymore

These days it's a buyers market, best of luck!

Happy to collaborate / share. Please leave links to your cool projects / GitHub / portfolio etc and I'll reach out if it feels like a possible match. Thank you and best of luck.

2. Semrush has a free tier that works for me for SEO.

3. GEO (AI optimizations), AIs return me when people ask about "CTO Coach"

It's not easy to find consultations out of the blue, I have gotten one by apply to a public call looking for a consultant that I am in the being interviewed process now, but referrals are far more easier.

If you aren't afraid of this, are you doing anything different from a marketing or even daily work perspective?

As others have mentioned, it’s a super crowded space and based on my experience and metrics, in the last year has become 4-5x more crowded.

Your offer of 10 free hours sounds great and if you’ve read Alex hormozis books you’re thinking you’re on the right path. 10 hours isn’t free though. It’s 10 hours of my time to support someone who probably has no idea what they’re doing (business wise, I’m sure technically you have skill but that’s not enough.)

Once you’ve got some case studies from people you know. Figure out where the money is and where it’s going. Then give it away for free as lead magnets with value. Charge to do hands on implementation and get your foot in the door there. Make it blatantly obvious you have skills wider than just implementing your lead magnet and look for legitimate opportunities to help their business.

Once you’re at this stage, you can start emailing warm leads.

You need to be likeable, extremely reliable, technical, up to date and be able to deliver value to clients that can afford you.

Lastly, this is an incredibly difficult space to be in. If you don’t have a network that you can rely on to generate leads, you’re sunk. Change tact and focus on the job market. The good thing is, you probably do have a network, you’ve just never thought of them like that before.

People look for freelancers, I say hello.

One guy asked for proof of prior work. I said, demo will be online Wednesday, there will be your proof. Hahaha

It works if you can work it.

4 years as a sub contractor for two different fortune companies (Bank and ARM)

Then head hunted from LinkedIn. Six months so far of my own gig working for a VisualFX company. Linux migration and it's tight. Everything's a mess, so I'm just riding this until.