>The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but

>The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but I don't know which companies have $10k problems. I can guess at it, but they sometimes don't even realize their $10k problem has a software solution. The companies also don't have incentive to talk to me to explore the possibility if I'm just a developer off the street. They sometimes do realise their $10k problem has a software solution though. You need to be in the pathway for when they go looking to solve it, not go to them. Advertise in the white pages as doing custom software development. You'll get plenty of businesses contacting you ready to pay money to solve all sorts of problems not currently addressed by off the shelf solutions. Very rarely are they actually willing to pay anywhere near the total cost to build it, but enough to make building it worth it to you if you can get a couple other customers on board.