> Personally, I value my own time well above my job's hourly rate
I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate.
I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.
It depends; we (small company/team) do emergency work, especially on legacy software including c++. We usually are at 300-500$/hr but $1000 has happened if the client is desperate and the work is hard. If a company is losing or not making the million$+/day they normally make, they don't care about the hourlies for the fix. We typically go in for a few hours to a few days; we don't take long term projects. Still we have pretty high utilisation.
For collecting the payments we use a factoring agency; it costs a % but whatever; we are always cashed up. And lead generation, well, people find us. I have been 'giving away' this 'business plan' for decades and no one is doing it. Probably because everyone wants to focus on something long term, not jump from php to c++ to cobol to java etc and because of the great resume driven dev strategy. I am for one looking forward to fixing the misery that is nextjs and its 'ecosystem' for the coming decades; please continue! I will have to up the hourlies to 1500+ for that miserable experience though; give me cobol or java any day.
I have not found an employer that values skills in multiple languages + quick at learning new ones. I assume these are the basic req for your type of work. Please share if you can how you got started .
At first we searched on twitter/linkedin for companies that seem to get into trouble more than once; hacked, downtime etc. Also down adsense links of big companies (click on the link -> they pay -> result page is 404, 500, or just dead); I have found these for Pepsi, Nike etc and then send them our proposal. When we started, the hourly was 150E/hr and one of the first we emailed (in London this was) came back and asked if we do entire projects as 150/hr was less than he paid the current people.
If you have extra work that needs doing, I think that I have the right kind of skills for this sort of thing, and I work for a lot less than $500/hour. I've already learned through hard-earned experience that I'm pretty terrible at running a business, however, so I'm not too keen to copy your business plan and implement it myself. It seems like you've got a great niche though and I don't doubt there will continue to be plenty of messes to clean up, especially considering how much care and craftsmanship goes in to most production systems these days. In case my sarcasm wasn't obvious, it's my assessment that in most cases, the care and craftsmanship is entirely absent, and for entirely understandable and defensible reasons.
I think it would be pretty tough for me to sell my marginal hours for more than my hourly rate.
I'm sure if I shopped around aggressively I could find a richer buyer for the 40-hour bundles I'm currently selling, but people aren't really beating down the door for a couple hours of C++ dev time here and there. Especially once you factor in time spent on lead generation, negotiation, dealing with collecting payment, etc, I think the market value of my free time is probably way less than my hourly rate.