I earn $180000/year, recently raised my rate to $280/h and working 40h/weeks. Feel I create way more value for my customers than my cost, so I started several small projects in parallell the last months to move away from consulting. Most of them was about a week of work and give about $10000/year with minimum maintenance.
Started building webpages, but figured out that this in itself don't solve a problem I can't fix with some sitebuilder (all about value). All my value creation in now in gathering data from different (API) sources into and databases and generating custom reports on this data. The most important skills I need is Python and SQL, stuff I did not know under 3 years ago.
For the $10000/year examples I make some prototypes, try to understand the business I try to sell to and calculate something I don't think they already easily know that will increase their revenue way more that my cost. Then I make the cold call (<3min), just to ask if I can send them an email with some analysis. They almost always get back the next day with an email or call back for more details or some adjustments.
Hope to go all into startup in a near future, only focusing on this. Love the feeling of solving real problems and see people willing to pay for it recurring <3