Yeah, my first contract came from a friend from a previous job who now worked at the startup. Subsequent ones were word of mouth (from people I’d met at the first one mainly), and one came as a result of seeing a Who is Hiring? post on here looking for permanent employees but I thought I’d ask if they’d consider contractors and they said yes.
However, I have plenty of friends who are contractors and get all their roles through recruiters. Most of them have said it pays to cultivate a good relationship with recruiter(s) you can trust to find you good roles - if they know you’re good (based on feedback from previous clients they placed you with) you’ll likely be the first person they reach out to when there’s a new role that would suit.
One thing to be aware of is that contract roles are often looking for people to start ASAP and are not willing to wait for long notice periods, especially if you’re coming from a permanent role to contracting (I was told this is partially because people sometimes actually end up staying in the perm role e.g. because they get tempted to stay, wasting everyone’s time)… so you might find you need to take a leap of faith and quit without anything lined up, unless you can get an in through someone in your network who’s willing to wait for your notice (this happened for me).
As I say I’m not sure how relevant this advice is in other countries, my impression is contracting in software dev is more common in the UK than many other countries.
Did you find these opportunities mostly through your personal network? What would you recommend to others looking to find similar opportunities?