It's not like business owners will stop talking to you if they find out your Klout score. Can you identify a business in your town which has previously purchased software development services? If not, go to a meetup, ask the people selling software development services who they have previously worked for.
An alternative: to a first approximation, any business with both millions in revenue and which pays for any professional services can also purchase software development services. Learn to estimate the revenue of a business from the outside (great life skill for consulting). One simple heuristic is "White collar employee count times $200k." Can you identify a business in your town which has 5+ white collar employees? Great.
Let's say you have a financial adviser firm in your neighborhood which has 8 white collar employees. Can you describe how a financial adviser makes money? If this isn't obvious to you from a lifetime of reading the Wall Street Journal, the answer is Googleable.
Find the guy at the firm who would have the authority to hire you. (At a firm with 8 people, "owner" is a fairly strong bet. You can identify him pretty easily, since he's plastered all over their website.) Talk to him. At a financial adviser firm, since his primary job is going to be sales, talking to him is really easy. You call them up and say "Hiya, I'm a software developer living in town and would like to speak to Bob. I read about him on the Internet and want to talk about financial advising." I predict a 98% success rate at successfully speaking to Bob.
You then talk to Bob like two business owners who each can learn something from the other. You can learn a lot about Bob about the financial advising industry. Bob can learn a lot from you about e.g. wild and whacky things computers can do these days, like email people. After you have learned from Bob how his firm works, you say "That's great, but there exist ways to make that even better with a bit of elbow grease. Let me outline how I'd get you more rich clients, directly increasing your revenue. It gets technical but the brief description is [pitch project here]. Interested in talking about this further?"
You then talk to Bob like two business owners
who each can learn something from the other.
I realize this is largely my inexperience talking, but how does one do that? How do I make that not feel like I'm wasting their time? How do I signal (without losing their interest) that I'm (a) not a customer, and (b) interested in understanding their business in a way that isn't meant to compete with him?
This is probably something that comes with experience, but I fear like initial forays would be flaming piles of failure.
You have meaningful expertise with technology and, from the perspective of the average business owner, you know more about that then they'll hope to learn in a dozen lifetimes. As long as you can connect your expertise with technology to concrete business goals of theirs, you won't waste their time. Should they not be in a position to talk to you or work with you, they will not be shy about saying so. We business owners are in business to sell and be sold to. Money goes in and money goes out. This is what we do. You will not offend the typical business owner just by saying that you have an offering available.
It is entirely possible that your first forays will be flaming failures. Oh well! More fish in the sea. You'll at least have learned one approach that didn't work, or have heard concrete objections as to why they didn't move forward with you, as opposed to the illusory objections that devs think will cost them business, like "You do not have a Github" or "I don't think you've built a website for a homeless shelter recently."
I think you will be surprised how willing people are to talk to you about the problems they have, if they think you might be able to help or offer advice.
Here are a few things that I've found work well:
1. Call them up, don't email. But always start by asking if it's a good time and offering to set up better time to call if they're busy. The call is important because people ignore emails and since it's known to be "low cost" to send them it indicates that they're probably being generally targeted instead of being called specifically. But being polite and offering to call at another time indicates that you respect their time.
2. Give them a quick idea of who you are and why you're calling them specifically. How did you find them? Why does what they do interest you? Tell them that you're interested in learning more about what they do and what kinds of frustrations they have with their technology. People like it when you are interested in what they do.
3. Instead of telling them what you want to do, ask them what they would like to have someone do. People love to complain about their problems, and it's good information for you to know. Knowing your potential client's problems will make you more conversant when talking to future possible clients. It's okay for you to not be able to address their problem, just take extensive notes on anything they say, and instead of trying to solve their issue on the phone or set up a contract right away, just ask questions. "Are there any other things you find frustrating?" is a totally legitimate question, and has given me usually much more useful information than specific stuff.
4. If they don't seem to be interested, or don't feel they themselves have interest in being involved, ask them if they have any ideas of who might be more in need of the kind of thing you can offer, or if they know anyone else who might be able to offer advice on what kind of services you could offer.
5. Ask them if there are any questions you should have asked but didn't. "Is there anything else that you think I should be asking about but didn't?" is a totally normal and reasonable question.
After you call your first five possible clients, compile that information, research the things they mentioned, and use that to refocus the way you present what you might be able to help with.
In response to poster below: I've actually had a great deal of success by emailing people. Most people assume that everyone has developed a shield that will bounce any email bordering on a sales pitch. The reality is that whether this happens is entirely dependent upon how you frame the conversation.
Being small is an immense advantage here. You can speak to the person in a way that a larger company can't. "Hi, I live nearby and am interested in what you guys do." That tenor of conversation has landed me two extremely lucrative contracts.[1] The conversations did not begin with "I need to sell you this thing." but rather "Tell me about your business and what you guys do day-to-day." To do this you don't even need to know anything about the industry at the outset (although it certainly helps if you do). After enough gigs you get really good at quickly dreaming up ideas that can help people that they have absolutely zero idea are possible or where to begin to develop them.
When you or I think of getting cold-emailed sales pitches we cringe because the typical sales pitch we receive is insulting.
"You should pay me for x even though I know nothing about you or your needs. Because of this, it is obvious I am not just selling you, but thousands of other people too."
However when you think of a sales pitch as a genuine attempt to start a conversation that you really believe would benefit the person you are attempting to sell to, you are actually helping them, not spamming them. People are receptive to those who express a genuine ability to help them.
[1] One contract, ultimately worth mid five-figures came about after being in contact with a particular business owner for two years. The sales process isn't necessarily a sudden spike but rather a gradual climb.
For those who actually tried it, is cold-calling any effective? Because if someone I don't know called me up and tried to sell me "solutions", I wouldn't bother giving him the time of day.
It very much depends - for everyone, I suspect including you, although I could be wrong - on what solution the caller is offering.
There are a truly vast number of "solutions" which people might try to offer me that I'm just not interested in.
However, if someone was to call up and offer me a production-grade finger motion capture solution for under $1000, they'd definitely have my attention. Ditto a procedural solution for creating interiors in a fantasy or medieval setting for use with path tracing renderers. And I could reel off another half-dozen ideas.
That's why Patio11's "talk to them, find out what their problems are" approach is so darn effective - it narrows down to the solutions that will actually capture your interest, because they're solutions to problems you actually have.
(Re finger capture - Yes, I'm aware of the Leap Motion and Control VR. Both are interesting, Control VR slightly more so, but neither are quite production-grade yet.)
To my ears, even though you've given some specific examples, your advice is really "get out there and hustle." I totally agree. You should do anything and everything you can think of to get your foot in the door.
Hitting the pavement and contacting businesses unsolicited would be extremely nerve-racking for me. I'd probably go more for contract jobs and/or existing consulting companies who are overloaded. It probably depends on your personality, whether you are good at sales and if you have your accounting/billing worked out.
I ran a consulting business for five years and my ex-employer became my first client. That allowed me to pay the bills. After that I started searching job boards for contract opportunities and eventually some of them turned into clients as well. If you're doing quality work then pretty soon the word will get out and the next thing you know you'll be so busy that you'll need to hire somebody. Then you can offer some other person their foot in the door!
So basically "find work locally"? That seems to ignore that (AFAIK) most people use Freelancer et al because it's remote work, because they live in a less developed country or rural area with poor-paying/nonexistent local work.
Nothing in this intrinsically requires you to be local to the client. I mentioned that because some people seem to be more comfortable with it.
I mean, you don't live in Tulsa, right? The Internet connects you to Tulsa. Can you find a financial advisor in Tulsa with 5+ employees using only the Internet? Can you find 10+ firms which are similarly situated in a day? Great. That should get you 2 ~ 5 meaningful conversations.
patio11 talks about it some in his writings/podcasts/etc.
Brennan Dunn talks about it heavily in his Consultancy Masterclass.
But here is a tidbit for free.
Join your local chamber of commerce. Set up a small seminar on a topic closely related to what you do. Invite local business owners to it (do it for free if you can, or charge a small amount..depends on how well established you are).
GIVE THEM ALL THE INFORMATION THEY WOULD NEED TO DO WHATEVER IT IS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
Pass out your email address, and let business owners contact you. You will have stablished your knowledge and authority, and even though you gave them a 4 hour speech on how to do internet marketing (or whatever), they wont have the time or comfort level to do it themselves...but now they will know one person who can.
Strong agree on there being many places to find clients.
I began my own freelance career by browsing http://jobs.perl.org and responding to the more interesting requests for contract work. That was like 7 years ago; pretty much everything I've done since then has been through referrals.
It's just a question of getting yourself kickstarted. There's plenty of great clients out there who need help, and aren't using crappy lowest-bidder sites (because they care about good work and are willing to pay for it).
FreelanceInbox.com can help with the finding clients and some of the jobs are small enough you wouldn't need a large reputation to successfully land one. Without a nice portfolio though you would need to work on a polished pitch. Completing personal projects is also a good way to pad your portfolio and show you're passionate about development.
*Full disclosure: I'm the founder of FreelanceInbox.
This post talks about the lessons I've learned from Brennan Dunn via reading his content on freelancing/consulting. Talks about how I went to meetups and got a few leads. Although, the two leads I've gotten from the meetups haven't turned into anything. I should write an update on that.
Hope sharing my experiences helps others save time not making the same mistakes.
