First get one small, but representative project under your belt. Don't focus on rate yet, but keep the scope small so that you don't work for peanuts for too long. Use it and your hobby projects as a portfolio.
Go to a few meetups to build your contact network. Against the intuition, developer meetups can be a surprisingly good place to find new gigs. Startup meetups can work too, there's more biz people there, but in general startup gigs are usually not very good freelance work: high expectations, small budgets, lot of people biz people who know too little about software dev.
Sooner you get to big customers with bottomless pits of money, easier your contracting life will get. This was the biggest lesson for me. For big customers, you can do projects that save them big bucks. Boring, maybe, but pays the bills and you can use the free time to do fun things. So if you want to get your contracting life off the ground, don't focus what is fun, but what is most profitable.
Go to a few meetups to build your contact network. Against the intuition, developer meetups can be a surprisingly good place to find new gigs. Startup meetups can work too, there's more biz people there, but in general startup gigs are usually not very good freelance work: high expectations, small budgets, lot of people biz people who know too little about software dev.
Sooner you get to big customers with bottomless pits of money, easier your contracting life will get. This was the biggest lesson for me. For big customers, you can do projects that save them big bucks. Boring, maybe, but pays the bills and you can use the free time to do fun things. So if you want to get your contracting life off the ground, don't focus what is fun, but what is most profitable.