The best way to start your own clientelle is to work on weekends on side apps or just make it stronger and stronger until it can be a product. I think thats how many Sun employees 'retired' from Sun Microsystem and became Iphone App developers and eventually made very popular apps. It was a popular story when the App Store first came about. Now you have Android, IOS, Nintendo and so many software publishing platforms and you can just get the internet to pay you to code.
Another popular story was the creator of a silly bird game (flappy bird) and was able to make 50k a day. Enough to retired for life in Vietnam where the average yearly salary is only 16k usd a year.