No portfolio. No referrals. No reputation yet. How do you get your first client?

On cold outreach, showing up consistently, and the slow work of building trust before anyone knows your name.

Nobody tells you this part.

The design part, the process, the craft, the deliverables. That you can figure out. You’ve been doing it long enough to know what good work looks like and how to get there. The part nobody prepares you for is what comes before any of that. Before a client, before a project, before a brief. The part where you have to find the person who is willing to trust someone they’ve never heard of with something that matters to their business.

That part is hard. And it doesn’t get talked about honestly very often.

What doesn’t work

Let me start there because it’s more useful than pretending I have it figured out.

Waiting for referrals doesn’t work when you’re starting from zero. Referrals are a second-stage strategy. They come from existing clients, from a network you’ve already built, from people who have seen your work and trust it enough to recommend you. When you’re at the beginning, none of that exists yet.

Posting on LinkedIn and hoping someone reaches out doesn’t work fast enough on its own. Building an audience takes time. The content matters and I’m doing it, but it’s a long game. It doesn’t solve the immediate problem of finding the first client.

Applying to job boards and freelance platforms means competing with hundreds of other designers (or more) on price. That’s a race to the bottom and it positions you as a commodity before you’ve had a chance to show what you’re actually worth.

What I’m trying instead

Cold outreach. Personalized, specific and direct.

Not the spray-and-pray kind. Not a template with the name changed. Each message written for one specific person about one specific thing I noticed about their product or website.

The structure I use looks roughly like this:

I open by acknowledging something real about what they’ve built. Something specific that shows I actually looked. Not “great product” but an observation about a specific feature, a specific design choice, something that signals I’m not sending the same message to a hundred people.

Then I ask a question about how it’s working. Something that gets them thinking about the problem I’m going to address, before I address it. “How is the conversion on that page holding up?” or “Are you finding that new users understand the value quickly?” A question that is genuinely useful regardless of whether they reply.

Then I name what I noticed that could be better. Honestly, specifically, without being harsh. Not a teardown. An observation from someone who cares about the quality of what they’re seeing.

Then I introduce myself briefly. Not a full bio. One sentence. I’m Carlos, a product designer based in Porto. I help companies like yours make sure the product they show online matches the quality of what they actually built.

Then a soft close. Would you be open to a quick call to talk through what I noticed?

That’s it. No hard sell. No portfolio attached. No pricing mentioned. Just a specific observation, a relevant question, and an invitation to talk. My magic formula if you can call it like that.

Why this approach, you might ask

Most cold outreach fails because it’s about the person sending it, not the person receiving it.

“I’m a designer with X years of experience and I’d love to work with you” is about me. The person reading it has no reason to care.

“I noticed this specific thing about your product and I have a thought about it” is about them. That’s a different kind of message. It shows you paid attention. It offers something before asking for anything. It treats the recipient as someone worth a genuine observation rather than a name on a list.

The conversion rate is not high. That’s expected. Most people won’t reply. Some will reply without any interest in moving forward. A small number will be genuinely interested.

But the ones who do reply are the right ones. They’re engaged, they care about their product, and they responded to a message that respected their time and their intelligence. That’s who you want to work with.

The honest state of things

Nothing has landed yet. I’m still in the outreach phase, still refining the message, still figuring out which types of companies respond best and which industries are most receptive.

What I know is that the personalized approach feels right in a way that other approaches don’t. It’s slower than a template blast. It takes more time per message. And it’s the only version of outreach I can send without feeling like I’m adding noise to someone’s inbox.

I’m also writing. Medium articles, LinkedIn posts, observations about design that are relevant to the people I want to work with. Not to build a massive audience. To demonstrate that I think carefully about this stuff. So that when someone receives a DM from me and looks me up, there’s something there that confirms the message wasn’t a fluke.

The content and the outreach work together. The outreach gets me in front of specific people. The content gives those people a reason to take the conversation seriously.

What I’d tell someone starting from the same place

Don’t wait until you feel ready. There is no ready. There’s only sending the message or not sending it at all.

Personalise everything. Not because it’s more polite. Because it’s the only version of outreach that actually works at this stage when you don’t have a reputation to do the work for you.

Expect a low response rate and send anyway. This is a numbers game in the sense that you have to keep going, but it’s not a numbers game in the sense that volume replaces quality. Ten genuinely good messages beat a hundred generic ones.

Show your thinking publicly. Write about what you know. Post about what you notice. Not to go viral. To exist somewhere that people can find you and understand what you stand for before they decide whether to reply.

And keep going. The first client is the hardest. Not because they’re the most important. Because everything before them is faith. You’re doing the work without proof that it leads anywhere.

It leads somewhere. You just can’t see it yet from here.

I’m Carlos, a product designer running from Porto. I work with startups and founders on products that are worth using. If something here resonated, feel free to connect.