Better phrasing: how do you pick up contracting work if you have absolutely no connections?
I'm not a particularly social person: I mostly just like staying home and working on coding projects in my off-hours. I didn't made friends or "expand my network" at my last few jobs; I just showed up, did work, and went home.
People always say "do contracting to save up money if you want to do a startup", but I have no idea how to get off the ground. I certainly have a lot of skills, but I'm not sure who I could possibly sell them to.
Is this when I just start cold-calling? I get the sense that nobody on HN is ever really bothering with inbound marketing for contracting services; I constantly see "programming talent is a seller's market" and "just use your network", but never anything about running ads for your services or anything.
here's how i did it: start responding to job ads and offer contracting services instead. local or remote.
it requires being social and talking to people. if you can't do this, just get a normal job, dude. you're barking up the wrong tree. nobody just sits around and gets contracts handed to them. anyone who tells you that is bullshitting you.
Oh, I'm not saying I can't be social. I'm just saying that I wasn't in the past—because of some wrongheaded assumptions—and so don't have a network to build off of.
I'm not a particularly social person: I mostly just like staying home and working on coding projects in my off-hours. I didn't made friends or "expand my network" at my last few jobs; I just showed up, did work, and went home.
People always say "do contracting to save up money if you want to do a startup", but I have no idea how to get off the ground. I certainly have a lot of skills, but I'm not sure who I could possibly sell them to.
Is this when I just start cold-calling? I get the sense that nobody on HN is ever really bothering with inbound marketing for contracting services; I constantly see "programming talent is a seller's market" and "just use your network", but never anything about running ads for your services or anything.