The Ugly Truth About Getting Your First Freelance Client

I sent out over 100 outreach messages. Not one of them closed. Not one.

It hurts in a specific way — not the sharp pain of a single rejection, but the slow, grinding kind that comes from watching your “sent” folder grow while your bank balance doesn’t. So I want to talk about why freelancing is harder now than it’s ever been, and why some niches are simply easier to break into than others. This isn’t a success story with a neat bow on it. It’s what actually happened.

Who I Am

I’m Himesh Solanki, from India. I taught myself game development — no bootcamp, no degree in it, just me, documentation, and a lot of trial and error. But right now, the thing that actually pays my bills is thumbnail design and video editing. That gap between what I trained myself to do and what I currently do for money is basically the whole story of this post.

Chasing Gamedev Gigs — and Getting Nowhere

I started where you’d expect: trying to freelance in the field I actually built skills in. I set up profiles and gig listings on Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer. I went into Discord servers and Reddit threads doing cold outreach, pitching myself as a gamedev freelancer — mechanics, scripting, whatever studios or indie devs needed.

It turned out to be pointless. Not “hard.” Pointless. Messages went unanswered. Gigs sat with zero views for days. I wasn’t losing to better freelancers in bidding wars — I wasn’t even getting into the room.

And this hit different because I wasn’t doing it for fun or for a portfolio piece. I was in absolute need of money, and failing to land even one client made that need feel a lot more desperate than it already was.

“Maybe My Portfolio Is the Problem”

So I did what most people would do — I blamed the portfolio. I told myself it was bad, unpolished, unimpressive. I spent another 1–2 months going back into my gamedev projects and making them presentable — cleaning up SmartEnemyAI, refining Mission Scripting, tightening up a handful of other systems I’d built. I came out the other side with a genuinely good portfolio. Work I was proud to show anyone.

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*Portfolio (YouTube Playlist)*

And nothing changed.

That’s the part that still sits with me. It wasn’t a skill problem. It wasn’t even really a presentation problem. The portfolio got better and the outcome stayed exactly the same — zero. Which meant the problem was somewhere else entirely, somewhere a better portfolio couldn’t fix.

Selling Out (Or So It Felt Like)

Desperation for money pushed me toward something adjacent to gamedev — graphics design, which I’d picked up as a side effect of building game assets and UI. I started making thumbnails, first for my own channel, then as samples, telling myself this would just be quick money to keep the lights on while I kept learning gamedev on the side.

But it came with its own anxiety. A real fear that I was doing the wrong thing — that the path I was choosing would slowly bury the actual goal, which was starting a game studio. That fear was fair. It wasn’t irrational. But the financial pressure couldn’t be ignored just because the alternative felt more “authentic” to what I wanted long-term.

And even after pivoting to thumbnail work, I still hadn’t landed a single paid client. Not one piece of what I’d call real “paid work.” The pivot didn’t immediately fix anything either — it just opened a different door to knock on.

The Twitter Breakthrough

Eventually I started taking Twitter (X) seriously as a strategy, not just a place to lurk. I made it my primary platform — posting consistently, replying to people constantly, putting my work in front of others instead of waiting for them to find it. That visibility is what finally moved the needle. Discoverability did what cold outreach on Discord and Reddit couldn’t. My first actual paid work came through Twitter — a thumbnail design gig.

I was happy. Genuinely relieved. But right underneath that relief was the same old fear resurfacing — that my real goal, the game studio, would suffer for it.

*Behance Portfolio*

Why Some Niches Are Easier Than Others

That’s when it clicked for me, in a pretty basic economics kind of way: demand and supply.

More demand for a service means more chances of getting hired to do it. Less demand means fewer chances, no matter how skilled you are. Freelancing runs entirely on this logic. Things like content creation, graphics design, and web development have consistent, high demand — so there are simply more openings, more clients, more chances to get picked. My actual formal skills — game design, gamedev — sit in a category with far less freelance demand. Studios hire in-house or through specific channels; there isn’t the same constant stream of “I need this today” gigs that content and design have.

It wasn’t that I was worse at gamedev than I was at thumbnails. It’s that almost nobody was shopping for what I was good at, while everybody was shopping for what I’d only picked up as a side skill.

The Competition Problem

The other half of this is sheer volume. The number of people trying to break into freelancing right now is enormous, and it keeps growing. It genuinely feels like sitting for JEE, NEET, or UPSC — except the exam hall is the entire internet. It doesn’t matter how skilled you actually are; you’re up against genuinely brilliant people, from every class and background, all around the world, all with the same internet connection you have and the same access to the same clients.

That’s not a reason to give up. It’s just the honest scale of what “getting your first client” actually means today. It’s not a small pond.

Is the “First 100 Clients” Thing True?

A friend of mine put it this way: the first 100 clients are the hardest, most brutal clients you’ll ever try to get — but after that, things get steadier, more relaxed.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. I haven’t lived long enough on the other side of it to know for sure. What I do know, from everything above, is that the difficulty isn’t random or personal — it’s demand, it’s supply, and it’s competition at a scale most of us weren’t ready for. Understanding that didn’t make the first client come any faster. But it did make the 100 rejections before it make a lot more sense.

That’s all for now.