How do I transition from working as Employee to Contracting?

Hi HN,

I'm at a point in my career where I'm considering starting a consulting business, and "working for myself", rather than working as an employee. I'd like to work remotely, on interesting, well-defined problems.

In the past I worked indpendently for about two years, starting off with one client a past college connected me with. That work was consistent enough to support me while I picked up additional clients.

What advice can anyone offer who's made the transition from working as an employere to working indepdently. How did you find your first clients? Did you advertise at all?

Did you work primarily hourly, or deliverables based?

Another potentially difficulty in my particular situation is that I've developed expertise in embedded systems, and as embedded systems work almost always requires hardware, the remote argument is harder to make.

Although I have worked with backends, frontends, databases, distributed systems, CI/CD, kubernetes, operating system, networking, message queuing, and more "pure software" technology, it's not self-evident from my work history, so selling my skills outside of core "embedded" work is tricky. Any advice on making the transition to a more pure software role?

I'm posting this from an almost a reverse-throwayay account. My "main" HN account is anonymous. Perhaps I will engage the internet with my given name(s) more going forward.