Similar experience The good news is there is nearly unlimited demand for programming work. However, you have to filter it very carefully, learn how to market y

Similar experience The good news is there is nearly unlimited demand for programming work. However, you have to filter it very carefully, learn how to market yourself and become very selective and specific about what you want to do. Pick a very specific niche which is specifically designed to be highly profitable, low custom work and doesn’t involve whole cloth creative agency work (trust me; you don’t want it). Strongly recommend finding a simple, repeatable system or workflow that allows you to constantly come into contact (in a valuable, engaging way) with your target audience (people who are going to pay you to do stuff). This can be a podcast, community, dinner series, workshop, roadshow, summit you organize. The objective is to make it valuable for you to be constantly reaching out and getting in touch about something OTHER than selling that person your services. I also recommend designing or developing your own IP. Create your own stack or best practices, turn that into a brand and go promote it. Try to only get work applying that exact stack. You don't want a disconnected stream of random work with no narrative. You want to anchor your consulting work or business in some fixed constraints so it becomes repeatable. Furthermore, you should be very specific about what work you want. You probably don't want to be doing end-to-end full stack "from zero" development. You would be better off applying some repeating system, taking over maintainance of running systems or selling your own IP. Find a community or start one where your target market hangs out and make yourself useful, visible and valuable. Learn how to select clients and stack retainer revenues. Quality over quantity.