Ask HN: How do you find freelance work?

Never sell yourself the first time you're meeting someone. Explain what you do and turn the conversation back the person you're talking to. People love hearing their own voice, so let them talk. Take a genuine interest in what they do and they'll remember you as a good person.

If you can help them, reach out the next day with the whole "I was thinking about X. We do Y, perhaps we could help." If you can connect them to someone who can solve their problem that isn't you, do that as well.

As the parent says, people remember and refer / think of you first when you're needed.

1/ Right now, tonight, go make a portfolio like this one (mine): http://www.hyperfiddle-consulting.com/ (it can be a github markdown gist, host images on imgur or github might even let you copy/paste images into markdown now). You do not want to be coding javascript and html here. It needs to iterate fast. And it needs to be done yesterday. Use markdown. Or a google doc.

2/ your portfolio will suck at first, but now that it exists, you feel that it sucks and now there is a driver function making you want to optimize it.

3/ post in the monthly HN freelancer thread, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495148 . If you don't get gigs, iterate your copy. Say you'll do it for a low rate if it gives you open source commits. -> feeds into portfolio

4/ get screenshots of whatever gigs you can (if for example it is a public site, or you can embed stuff into a company github readme for example https://github.com/wingspan/wingspan-forms#screenshots-from-...) -> feeds into portfolio

5/ company doesn't do open source? Offer to open source some library or utility in your free time. I polished wingspan-forms over thanksgiving and christmas break 2013. It's a shitty library, nobody uses it. But it feeds into portfolio!

6/ spend at least one weekend a month writing a blog post, tips and trick for whatever javascript framework, or something -> feeds into portfolio

7/ go to a lot of local meetups, at least 1 a month, offer talks, your blog is the starting point for talks, speak at least twice a year -> feeds into portfolio

Freelancing is more work up front than wage slaving. But the sky is the limit as to how much you can make. Oh and cut the silly bullcrap about not good at networking blah blah whatever. Read a howto social skills book and show up at meetups.

You can also set filters for location, contract vs perm, size of company, and set a personal note on what you are open to.

It depends on the job and also on your philosophy and your contracting rate, of course, but I bill only for hours that I’m actually physically in my chair working on the project, and nothing else. Speaking with other contractors, this seems like the norm to me.

Even if you’re not working, a very enlightening and worthwhile exercise is to track your time to the minute at your day job and find out how much you’re actually working. I use toggl to track my time (which I’m not endorsing, use anything that’s tolerable and convenient enough, it’s not like time tracking is fun). Toggl stops tracking after a configurable x number of minutes idle, I use 5. I stop tracking while I’m emailing or reading hacker news. I also don’t track time spent billing; putting together reports on my time & progress and such.

If you’re like me or most people, you might be really surprised to find out that breaks and office chatter and surfing and lunch actually consumes 20%-40% of your work day.

What was your rate, if you don't mind me asking? About how many hours/month were you able to book?

I'm asking because high rates are great if you can get regular work...