I didn't even do that. I just told people in my immediate vicinity that I am open to individual projects. One project came from my wife's ex-boss, one project c

I didn't even do that. I just told people in my immediate vicinity that I am open to individual projects. One project came from my wife's ex-boss, one project came from a colleague who got a project via LinkedIn, but didn't want to take it himself. You can just drop it in casual conversation. "What do you do for a living?" "Oh I'm a software developer at X-Corp, and I also do some work for individual clients" Something like that. People remember that stuff. If you like, you can even tell people you offer a finder's fee. Just don't be pushy. Be willing to build the business part-time until you have enough work to take it full-time. You probably won't be getting big projects from the get go, but if you are humble, that won't be a problem. My first project was just optimizing and cleaning a slow and messy Python script. I charged $35 an hour an threw 10 hours into it.