This is absolutely true. There's no money in building new websites. Instead, solve problems for people who already have well-established websites (read: a steady revenue stream) and want to go further.
The client doesn't even need to be a business that's larger than your own, as long as they have lots of money. There are websites out there that are run by literally one person and get tens of millions of page views per day. Be the engineer who can solve his scalability problems, and he'll throw at you whatever money you ask for.
I've also found professional associations to be well-paying clients. They're too busy making money in their own professions, if they encounter an IT problem, they'll pay anything to make it go away.
If you go down this path, though, be prepared to read and endless stream of legacy code, write compatibility layers, do live data migrations, and spend a lot of time in general trying to untangle other people's spaghetti PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. It's an established website, after all. You're not there to rewrite it in your favorite framework. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I face so little competition ;)
But how do you find these business who are established, but have problems that can be solved. I don't want to be the guy who has a solution in search of a problem.
The client doesn't even need to be a business that's larger than your own, as long as they have lots of money. There are websites out there that are run by literally one person and get tens of millions of page views per day. Be the engineer who can solve his scalability problems, and he'll throw at you whatever money you ask for.
I've also found professional associations to be well-paying clients. They're too busy making money in their own professions, if they encounter an IT problem, they'll pay anything to make it go away.
If you go down this path, though, be prepared to read and endless stream of legacy code, write compatibility layers, do live data migrations, and spend a lot of time in general trying to untangle other people's spaghetti PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. It's an established website, after all. You're not there to rewrite it in your favorite framework. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I face so little competition ;)