When I used to freelance I divided my marketing activities into two categories: "hunting" and "farming".
Hunting tactics include things like responding to job board ads, reaching out to people you know to see if they can help you find a gig, or going to a conference to try to find a new client. Like real hunting, hunting for clients can be fast, but it’s only successful a fraction of the time, and you don’t always get something good.
Farming tactics include things like writing blog posts, writing books, speaking at local meetups, speaking at conferences, guesting on podcasts, hosting podcasts, and other things that demonstrate your technical competence to a (if done successfully) large number of people. Farming can yield much better results than hunting, but there can be quite a long interval between the time you plant the seed and the time you get to reap the harvest. And just like in real farming, not all the seeds you plant will sprout into plants that bear fruit.
In my experience, farming tends to yield better clients than hunting, although you can't control when the clients are going to come.
I hate to say it but I think your safest bet is for you and your colleagues to each go your separate way (for now) and find contract gigs individually. In my experience it's really hard to find a client who wants to hire multiple people at once. The easiest kind of client to find is a software organization that needs a programmer and is willing to use a contractor rather than a full-time employee.
And BTW, the sad secret I learned about freelancing over the course of ~8 years doing it is that 99% of freelancers are just staff-aug contractors. They're not making great money and they don't have a special lifestyle. The only difference between most freelancers and regular employees is that the freelancers file 1099s instead of W-2s. Not trying to be a downer about it but I think it's helpful to acknowledge the reality of it.
Lastly, I've been asked many times how to get freelance clients, so I wrote a post about it here: https://www.jasonswett.net/my-advice-to-brand-new-freelance-...
Hope that helps.