I figured out freelancing somewhat organically, around the end of my first year of college, while getting a haircut. The guy giving me the haircut turned out to

I figured out freelancing somewhat organically, around the end of my first year of college, while getting a haircut. The guy giving me the haircut turned out to be the store owner, and we talked for a bit about how you can host your business phone in the cloud. A couple days later I had a simple Java applet making API calls to Twilio (it was my first year of college, I didn't know better ways to do it back then). He loved it - he could set it to remind his repeat customers to come in for a haircut at the frequency of their choosing. My favorite thing about that project is how simple it was and how little time it took. For a shitty Java UI that improved his ability to do business, I got a couple hundred bucks and free haircuts for life. After that, whenever I walked into a pizza place or burrito place or whatever, I asked the store owner if there's any way I can help them improve their efficiency or web presence. In my head it felt like I'd get a resounding "fuck off" from all of them, but in reality small business owners are wonderful people who love talking about how to improve their business. Small business owners who are hostile towards random people asking them stuff usually don't stay in business for very long. By the end of college, there were three places I could go to get a free pizza, and I hadn't paid for a haircut in three years. By the way, one of those pizza store owners had a cousin who worked in a small private lending company. I set up a Python library for him to scrape data from this ancient silo of data and graph it - that was the first job that paid really well. The key is to realize that being a good designer and engineer is like being a superhero in today's world. You do something that nobody else can - take advantage of it while it's still relatively rare.