Ask HN: How do you find clients when you have no network and can only do remote?

I think the biggest thing you can do is establishing credibility with potential clients. The easiest way to do that would to be an existing set of clients, which you don't have. That's fine, everyone has to start from somewhere.

Your clients could or could not know much about the software development life cycle, and how to evaluate if you have the skills to meet whatever needs they may have. Perhaps you could network with existing freelancers who are too busy to take on new clients.

Spitballing here, but maybe working on or creating an OSS project could give you credibility to those freelancers. Or maybe you could work under a successful freelancer to establish yourself in the space. Maybe the site you built will lend you credibility to others.

Alternatively, if you have business ideas you'd like to try out, you could try working for yourself and creating your own income. Also, it doesn't hurt to sign up for LinkedIn. It might not be immediately beneficial, but once you find your first client, maybe they'll write you a glowing review.

> having worked remotely for the past 5 years has really limited my ability to build a network. I don't have LinkedIn and even if I did, it's more meant for building a network than for finding a quick gig.

Yeah, it's hard to build a network. Time to start putting in the effort. I sense a tinge of can't-do attitude here (but obviously, the tone interpreted in written communication is subjective) -- I don't know if it's the case or not, but a can't-do attitude is not what you want to have for freelancing work. Your lack of a network, or having an expansive one, is ultimately the result of your personal decisions. You have to be willing to give it a shot. If networking sounds not fun, or like a chore and otherwise unpleasant, you're probably better off just working for a big tech company. Personal skills are far more important in freelancing and entrepreneurship when compared to standard full-time employment.

Best of luck. Now go out there and kick some ass.

I wrote about how I learned to get consulting leads: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-le...

TL;DR - Decide who is your ideal client. Identify their 1) common pain points and 2) which online communities they participate in (may or may not be HN). Write advice that will help them with their pain points, and share it in those communities. This will in effect advertise that you know how to solve their problems. Don't be too modest to say you're available for consulting projects, and make it easy for people to contact you.

PS - As someone else suggested, you may want to add your contact info here. There's a big overlap between people who browse HN and people who need and have the budget/authority to hire contractors.

Applying now, thanks!

Something I find rather intimidating about toptal is their top 3% advertising, when I think of top 3% work I think of, say, writing an RFC of a widely used internet protocol, inventing a language and writing its optimizing compiler, automated air traffic control, debugging live code on nuclear reactor SCADA systems, that kind of stuff. I'd be interested in work at a calmer more laid back environment like only top 5% or top 10% job responsibilities. Its possible everyone there is massively underemployed, but probably not.

What I'm getting at is there's nothing wrong with a site that matches brain surgeons to brain surgeon jobs, unless you'd be chill getting an ophthalmic surgeon gig, where do I go? upwork is famous for posting gigs that would pay $125K in SV but the dreaded "average pay rate" is reported as $9.81 or whatever.

Possibly "top 3%" is meaningless in the sense of "ninja rock star" is meaningless and anyone who can fizzbuzz is by definition in the top 3% of human species programming talent.

Good idea, thanks.

Updated my profile with an email. Don't have resume in order yet. But have done plenty of Clojure, front-end and back-end work, made several iOS/tvOS apps that ship on the App Store.

If anything comes from this, great, but I'm not betting on it, so I'm going to focus most my efforts on the suggestions to give try toptal, upwork, and freelancer.com a serious try for the short term, and to build a network for the long-term.