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If you are willing to work for less than stellar rates, I have found work through oDesk and Rent-A-Coder (now vWorker). If you live in the US and have kids or want to be comfortable, its going to be really hard to make enough money on those sites. But if you are like me and are just trying to get by, you can find work that pays enough to live on on those sites. If you live in a place with a significantly lower cost of living, I would definitely take advantage of sites like that without hesitating.

What I do is I find the rare project post that contains an actual specification of some sort which doesn't seem completely ludicrous and is something that I can make a fair start on within 1-3 days of work. I build out a prototype hitting on a few of the major technical aspects of that spec. A significant portion of the time I win the bid after sending them a link to the prototype or a video of it in action.

Another place I found a client was on reddit. Someone posted a job as an ad at the top of the page. It didn't have a real spec but it did hint at some specific technical aspect of the project, so I built a quick prototype based on a related open source system. Then I told them that I wasn't interested in a regular job but rather wanted to work in a freelance capacity (because that is what I wanted).




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