It’s gone from a social experiment for hipsters to a huge business.  

As others have said, start attending local real estate investor meetings like REIA and if your market has a social media group for investors that is local (not national ones) then you may try networking there as well.

This is far more complicated tax-wise and socially.

I'd steer clear of seeking them from national forums/social media groups like this as relationships are key to creating these connections and it's hard to sort through the junk/scams.And the more you can talk intelligently about how to safeguard private capital and fund the loan securely, the more private lenders will want to work with you, especially new/novice ones with little experience lending or investing in real estate.

Most of the people I know I don’t have an address or phone number for, social media has been my method of keeping in touch.

The same way, if I just trust the process and have faith, then everything will work out.I've been soaking up every podcast, YouTube video, book and social post I can get my hands on to better understand how things work and feel that I am now in a much better place of things not being so overwhelming.

Sold the house that weekend and 30 days later after closing and right after we took a picture together for Social media I told her it was a prank and it was a picture off google, she  turned bright red.  

I would say some of the best ways to work on getting lead would be to utilize your social media pages.

Basically, the entire industry is making a push to move from HML to a more socially acceptable taxonomy of private lenders, though that is a stretch since most of the "big dogs" are somehow tied to Wall St/institutional capital and have somewhat high doc underwriting by comparison to local hard money or truly individual private capital.

Use social media as a marketing tool.