I actually am, and I'm a Hacker News nobody that is 100% solo, including all of my sales.
I started in mid-2012 after being fed up with every employer out there, but was well aware that I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary as a senior dev was like pulling teeth. At the time I was gritting my teeth to collect a paycheck. I got fed up with it, quit after managing to line up an engagement (and getting contracts drawn up), and struck out on my own.
In 5 1/2 years I've averaged 42 hours of billing a year, with the big gap mostly being because I decided to take 6 months off in 2016. I started hourly, but I learned exactly what Patrick learned and switched to weekly for the bulk of my engagements (which are short term), with a more amenable rate for long-term projects (we're talking 6+ month with many small projects, or one huge one). Most of it has been putting out fires to save a director's or VP's job, which gets you solid recommendations from said directors and VPs when servers go from on fire to twiddling their thumbs being nearly idle. Though I've built data warehouses and the teams to manage them as well.
There is a lot of selling. I'm either sourcing or making a ton of calls or emails every week, which isn't easy for someone that doesn't like to toot their horn. However, working remote affords me the ability to do that, as well as work with anyone in the US. If a local client wants me on site (preventing me from doing sales) there's a heck of rate increase for that, which causes most to let me work off site, though a few bite and the bump more than covers my opportunity cost.
There's also a bit of contingency recruiting. Employees take note when you turn a disaster into boring, easy to manage calm. More so when you teach them what you know. Keep in touch, and when you see the writing on the wall, perhaps your current client is what both of them needs. After all, you're already an approved vendor, so might as well make things even better for your client (and the top-notch candidate) and stick another $40-50K in your pocket for your trouble.
From when I started I TRIPLED what I was making (and am not in a cheap market), and making more than senior AmaGooFaceSoft devs in the Valley (incl. options and benefits) despite living nowhere near Califonia. Yet I'm still some nobody that's been on Hacker News since mid-2009 that just does fairly boring database things. Though there's a ton of database work out there.