OK guys, this is a weird/dumb topic but I'm at a loss and maybe someone smart can help me out.

I'm 1 half of a 2-man software consulting shop, we mostly only do bigger consulting jobs that take 6 months+, we hire a lot of stuff out of course (so it's not just the 2 of us all the time), but ya.

We have about a month of dead time here before another big long job that takes all our time up gets going. My partner spends money like crazy and just spent a bunch on his house and car and whatever else and apparently he needs some short term cash- he says hey man can you get the word out for us and try and line up some smaller jobs, just doing websites for smallish locally-owned businesses for say $1500 a pop or something. Sounds fine to me, but I have no idea how to get the word out fast and how to find these people. I both hate and suck at marketing and don't feel like getting all salesy over tiny little jobs. I'm guessing the market for guys wanting to do that stuff is overcrowded anyways.

What's the easiest way to find these people and make stuff like this happen?

Again, sorry for the kinda dumb topic and if no one answers it I won't feel bad.

e-lance

Can you guys do a vbulletin skin? or just coding?

This won't be a ton of help, but my advice is to stick your neck out and don't be afraid of hearing a lot of nos. Have you done websites in the past? Find their competitors (esp the ones with crappy websites!), shoot them emails, and point them to your previous work. Send out A LOT of emails -- if you send 200, get 20 replies, and turn those into 2 gigs, you're set til your next project.

if you go to elance or rentacoder you will be bidding against people in 3rd world countries and busto college kids who will bid far less than 1500 a website. So, I don't think that is a viable option really for you.

The only idea I have besides going out and meeting people is Google ads: lets say you live in San Francisco, you can have google show ads to people in San Francisco who search for 'web development company', 'sf web development', etc etc

That could work. You can test it out for cheap and see what happens

it is a really crowded market though

Yes we have people that do vbulletin/phpBB skins. I don't do it personally

This isn't a bad idea, and yeah we have done tons and tons and tons of websites, but mostly bigger ones with database backends that have to do a lot more than look cute... but yeah that's what he wants to do now just bang out a few smaller ones that don't take more than a few days each to implement, I gotta find people that need that.

I guess mass mailing/phone calling is the traditional way and I'll do that for sure for a few hours tomorrow but yuck I really suck at that stuff.

I really wish he was good at poker so we wouldn't have to do this! I don't mind just playing a few hours a day in the downtime and chilling for the next month

Yes you are right on elance/rentacoder, I used to hire guys off there way back when and while the quality was hit or miss the price was always dirt cheap. My favorite website we've ever done was drawn up by a designer off rent a coder for like $150. So sick (and no it wasn't a template, like 95% of people on there just want to re-skin some ****ty template but I aint no sucka.)

Google ads I will do tomorrow too thanks for the idea, but yeah it is a ******edly crowded market especially for these little tiny projects and I guess it doesn't help that most of the buyers of these dont' really know the difference between a good design and a god awful design.

If you guys are partners I don't quite understand why he doesn't beat the bushes himself if he's strapped.

I think it's fair enough, he's brought in the last few big clients.