Go to meetups, talk to colleagues who have quit your current company, try to attend or speak at conferences, start a blog and post at the bottom that you’re available for consulting...
There’s no rule that says you can’t pitch projects to people, if you think you could help make a company better call them up and pitch them on it.
1. What kind of meetups? I'm guessing developers are inclined to go to developer meetups, but it seems unlikely that potential clients would be there.
2. How have you managed to get hired by technology companies as a consultant? My clients are mostly folks that are non-technical and need someone to build them custom software. I'd love to work with tech-focused companies but am not sure how to find/pitch those opportunities.
Living in SF helps. I meet people at meetups, on Twitter, through Github, I reach out to people I think are interesting...
You could try finding a company you’d want to work for and take one of their engineers to work, or try to target companies that need your skill set. “Hi you really need a Go client library - I can build that for you” etc.
That's actually really helpful. It's tempting as a consultant to be reactive, but these are a few ways of being proactive that I had not considered. Thanks!
Any meetup that could have you next potential customer. For me it's meetup about Marketing, Sales, pure networking, Developer conf, .... Force youself to 1 to 2 meetup a week, this is not a one off thing but a long term investment if you want to be on the call when someone you've met hear about a project within their company.
> How have you managed to get hired by technology companies as a consultant?
For me, it's not really technology companies but companies that sees IT as a cost center, the usual scenario being they need a solution for a problem and don't have the know how to make it all work because IT isn't part of their core skills and the IT guys are only there to manage the network and debug their window machines
Dang, two meetups per week is quite a commitment, but I can see it being valuable over the long term.
My interest in technology companies is that, presumably, they have more interesting technical challenges and are willing to spend the time/money to build optimal solutions from a technical standpoint.
There’s no rule that says you can’t pitch projects to people, if you think you could help make a company better call them up and pitch them on it.