A single-speaker monologue describing how the speakers built a client base from scratch by doing free work to gain credentials, collecting shout-outs and credits to use as proof, then converting those into paid jobs and progressively taking on larger clients to scale their portfolio. Emphasis is on gradual, stepwise growth rather than sudden jumps.
We were so low down that the only way was up. But essentially we started off by doing things quite small. So when you have no experience, no background, no nothing, you've got to build up credentials. That's kind of step one. So for us, we were young, money wasn't an issue for us at all. So we're very fortunate there had no dependents, had nothing like that, very much on a student budget. And so the opportunity we had was to build our credentials. So we started off by doing work for free. So we'd go around and say, look, we'd give you, we'll do the free work for you, we'll give you a website, we'll give you marketing support, whatever it is, and in return, all we ask is you give us a shout out on your socials, you give us credit on the website, et cetera, et cetera. And we used that first wave to kind of build out our initial set of clients and then off the back of that, we started to leverage those clients to start charging people initially, which was a very exciting moment. We still remember those first paid jobs and to slowly start building out the sport from there. So every sort of raft of clients would then fund the next round or next step up from a sort of size wise. So you don't go from nothing to Aston Martin, but you start off with like small blog sites, you then start work with small businesses, then you start working with medium sized businesses and slowly sort of build out your portfolio that way. So there was no sort of real trick to it, it was just slowly identifying who we wanted to work with and slowly sort of building up our raft of clients from there, really.
