I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.

My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig

So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,

I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself

thank you

the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well.

right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range.

i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.

Thank you

good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide

I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.