Consulting as bootstrapping can work - but it is very very hard. I did this as well and it's easy for the consulting to eat up more and more of your time. I spent a ton of time in 2010 doing 2 consulting projects to keep money coming in - if I had instead looked to borrow the 50k those consulting projects brought in I would be much farther along then I am now.
Do either of you have any advice on becoming an independent consultant? I'm 1 year out of college and working with a government contractor but I'm not sure how much marketable experience I have in that realm, or how to gain it (besides slugging it out for years).
Call a consultant recruitment agency, they'll be able to guide you. The bad news is you DO need to slug it out for years, to gain experience. Not many companies will pay you 100+ USD an hour, if you are fresh out of college.
I talked with a handful of consultant recruitment companies before landing my current contract through one of them. They all said that to get seriously considered, you need a degree and 5 years of full-time commercial experience, OR no degree but 10 years of full-time commercial experience. And that is today. Just 2-3 years ago the requirements were much tougher, due to many consultants on the market, but not very many assignments. This is on the Scandinavian market at least.
Basically, the more experienced you get, the higher hourly rates you can generally get. You'll also need to be able to sell yourself though, which can naturally be hard. That's where the recruitment agencies or agents come in. You get 10-20% less money by going through an agent, but they take care of the selling. You just show up for the interviews.
I often wonder about this as well. Currently I do all of my side projects as software development, but seldom as a consultant although I have now over five years of industry experience, spanning many areas of project development.
