How do I get software development projects?
I did it, but I had to a) sell the house and live on the proceeds for a year while I built up a client roster, and b) I took several clients with me from my previous employer (with their blessing- that’s really important). I’d suggest – before quitting- joining the local user groups, meeting the other nerds in your area, and making a significant effort to find local folks with interesting development projects in your area. It’s imperative that you identify one or more clients before you quit the day job. The local nerd meetup, linux meetup, etc, will help you network. Check out meetup.com for your area. Also, you’ll probably not be able to split your time that easily; project work comes in spurts, so you need to anticipate being extremely busy (sometimes) and extremely worried about the mortgage (pretty often). The most important thing is to have plenty of cushion. Make sure you have cash on hand to survive for many months- I’d recommend 6, but 3 may work- without pay.
My experience with this is that you might need some of those small projects to build your client base. If you do a good job on a small projects, they’re more likely to call you back for help with a bigger project. I quit my corporate job to go back to grad school in another field, but for the last year two years have made money doing sporadic web projects from CSS/HTML to PHP/SQL to a custom e-commerce backend. I’ve found all my clients but one through word-of-mouth. The one not through word of mouth was through craigslist. Craigslist has been pretty good for me, though – I’ve had other offers I’ve had to turn down via craigslist and if other stuff hadn’t come up, I’d have more than enough to do for a while just from answering craigslist ads. The catch is that most of these are small, but steady, meaning strings of small projects for the same clients. Like somebody needing help with their website for ten hours a week for a few months, or filling a position for the summer until they can
In my own freelancing career I’ve found that a lot of companies like to outsource work to people in their local area with whom they can meet face-to-face. It’s worth researching the businesses of all sizes within easy travelling distance that do the kind of work you’d be interested in pursuing. Call them for a chat if you can, and arrange to visit when they’re not too busy. Explain that you can bring in additional expertise if necessary. A face-to-face meeting is your chance to impress these people with your professionalism. Leave them with a comprehensive resumé/CV and follow any meeting up with a call a week later. A lot of businesses seem very reluctant to farm out work to unknown individuals on the internet – that fear can be used to your advantage. Smaller companies in particular often find that they have times when there’s just too much work to handle internally, and they often like to have a reserve of expertise they can call up when things get busy. And try to write up some cas
I feel like I point this out in nearly every one of these threads, and I suspect you already know it anyway — but the briefest glance at the going rates on bottom-scraper sites like elance, rent-a-coder, etc should instantly confirm that they’re a waste of your time. I have absolutely no idea why people keep suggesting them. There are much more reputable job boards out there if you wind up going that route (I should keep a list of urls handy, since I end up linking to them so often, but here’s one at least.) That said, the vast majority of my work still — even a decade after I went freelance — comes at least indirectly via people I worked with back when I worked in an office. This is by far your best bet, especially if you want to be working on larger projects than are commonly available on job boards. I was lucky to be working in an industry (publishing) that routinely employs freelancers, but even if you don’t it’s probable that you have mor
