It seems we are getting popular on Google. Every week now, new people join the server. Most of them never read what the group is about. They join, and within the first few minutes, the message lands.
“How do I get clients?”
I am used to this by now. Honestly, I am burnt out by it.
Before this server, I ran freelancing mentorship at SadaSchool, a 6,000-person public community built around SadaPay. No filters, anyone could walk in. And every other day, someone would show up and say the same thing.
How do I get clients. How do I get clients. How do I get clients.
It wears you down. Not necessarily because the people are bad, but because the question is.
And it usually shows up with the same bad habit attached.
A community is not a fish market. You don’t walk in, drop a link, shout “hire me,” and expect money to appear. You are entering a room full of professionals. Standing in the doorway and yelling that you are for sale is the fastest way to be ignored.
Could someone get hired that way? Maybe, on a very slim chance. But nobody in their right mind hands real work to a stranger whose first message is a sales pitch. You earn trust somewhere before anyone trusts you with their money. People have absolutely landed work through the server, so I am not saying it can’t happen. I am saying it happens after you build a reputation, not instead of it.
“I Need Clients” Is the Most Generic Question There Is
The problem with “I need clients” is that it isn’t a real question. It is the most generic of generic questions. It is the freelancing version of “I want to live a good life, how do I do it?”
This pattern is so common across the internet that it has its own website. Go look at dontasktoask.com. People open with “is anyone here good at X?” instead of just asking the thing. There is another one, the XY problem, where you have decided that some solution Y is your answer, so you go around asking everyone about Y, when your real problem was X the whole time. “I need clients” is exactly that. Clients is the Y you jumped to. The actual problem, the X, is buried somewhere underneath, and you haven’t bothered to dig it out.
A good question has variables. It has information. It has context. Without those, any answer I give is a good answer, because your question gave me nothing to work with. You say “I want to get clients,” and I could just as easily reply “GIT GUD bruh” and that would be a completely fair answer, because an open question earns an open answer. You gave me nothing, so I give you nothing.
You can’t get clients. Fine. Why?
Is it because you don’t have a portfolio? Is it because, honestly, you just aren’t good enough yet? Is your rate wrong? Are you getting the conversation started but falling apart on the follow up? Which specific part of getting a client is actually breaking for you?
That is the question. When you organize it that way, naming the exact piece that is failing, someone can actually mentor you on it. Until then, there is nothing to mentor.
Where Clients Actually Come From
First, understand one thing. There is no free scene. None.
If you are sitting there hoping to get clients for free, stop, and go write a resume and apply for a job instead. There is nothing free here. You will either pay money, often a lot of it, or you will pay a brutal amount of time. Those are your only two currencies. Pick one, because you are spending one of them no matter what.
With that settled, you realistically have three options. Maybe a fourth, depending on who you are.
Option One: Platforms
Platforms are still the most direct way to get started, and for most beginners they are the best first move. You don’t need a network or referrals for it. You show up, you apply, and you can land work without knowing a single soul. So pick one and go deep on it. Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, PeoplePerHour, Freelancer, do your own research and choose.
The catch is that the two biggest, Upwork and Fiverr, are not the easy on-ramp they used to be. Take Upwork. You buy connects just to bid, they charge fees on both sides of the job, and the service fee is now a variable rate set by an algorithm you don’t even see until you submit a proposal. On top of that, AI has hollowed out the entry-level work that used to be the easy way in. Breaking in there fresh, with no money to spend, is harder and pricier than it was even two years ago. You are realistically burning 400 to 500 connects before you land your first client, real money out of pocket before you earn a cent.
And don’t sit around waiting for a better giant to show up and fix this. It isn’t coming. Building the website where clients post jobs and freelancers apply is the easy part. The payments network and the legal compliance underneath it is the brutal part, and that moat is why nobody rivals Upwork and Fiverr and won’t for a while. But that cuts both ways. Smaller and newer platforms keep popping up, and because they are far less saturated, they can be an easier place for a beginner to catch a first break, even if they will never match the big two for volume.
So here is how I would play platforms today. If you can put a little money in and grind it properly, the big two still work, and I have a full Upwork Masterclass and a breakdown of the most common Upwork questions to run you through it. If you are starting with nothing, look at the smaller, less crowded platforms first, and treat whatever you pick as a launchpad, land your first clients and proof, then take those relationships somewhere you own. You can absolutely still break in this way, plenty do. Just go in knowing it takes money or a serious amount of grinding and a bit of luck, not the free lottery ticket people expect it to be.
Option Two: Community, Social, and Outreach
The second option is outreach. It can be cold or warm, depending on whether you are doing it in a community, on social media, or over email. I have run workshops on this, Marketing 101 for freelancers and how to stand out and niche yourself when you are starting out.
But this ties straight back to the argument I opened with. If community is your channel, walking into a server and saying “here’s me, here’s my portfolio hosted on Vercel because I couldn’t be bothered to buy a domain, please hire me” gets you nowhere. Nobody bites. The website is just a business card.
You have to warm up first. Through your communication, through showing up, through being useful. You build a reputation in a community before you ever see real work come out of it. You need to be known for something. “This guy, he’s done solid work, he’s helped people here, he actually knows his stuff.” That is what gets you referred. Which brings me to the third point.
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Option Three: Networking and Referrals
The third channel is your network and your referrals.
Here is the truth, and it is also the biggest reason I tell people not to rush into an agency (more on that below). There are many reasons to wait. You don’t have the portfolio yet, you don’t have the earnings yet, you don’t have the funds to market. But the biggest one is this. You don’t have a network yet, and you don’t have referrals.
When you work solo for 2 or 3 years, you are building relationships the whole time. Then one day you decide to go agency, and you have those relationships to call on. “Hey, remember me, I did such and such for you when I was solo. I’ve started my own business now. Keep me in mind.” That is an excellent position to be in, but only if you did good work back when it was just you.
Same logic if you freelanced before, or if you got well known on a platform, or if you were genuinely active in a community. Your network and your referrals can make or break a business when you are starting it. Review the Blueprint on high ROI versus low ROI networking so you are doing it in a way that actually compounds, instead of just collecting contacts.
So those are the three. Platforms. Community, social, and cold outreach, done right and niched properly. And network and referrals you can lean on from relationships you have actually built.
The Possible Fourth: Working Under Someone
The fourth one depends on who you are. If you happen to know an established freelancer or a small agency that is drowning in work, the fastest way to real, paid experience is to work under them. You do the work, they own the client. You are borrowing someone else’s trust and their relationship while you build your own. It is not available to everyone, which is why it is the maybe-fourth and not part of the core three. But if that door is open to you, it is one of the quickest ways to get your hands on actual projects.
Don’t Confuse Proof With Channels
Building a portfolio is good. I have written about how to do it properly, so go through that. But here is what almost everyone gets wrong.
Building a website, slapping some portfolio items on it, and following every best practice, even mine, does not mean a client lands in your lap. A portfolio and a website are a business card. They say, “if you happen to look me up, I have a presence, I have proof, I am not empty handed.” That is the whole job. And it doesn’t even have to be your own site. It can live on your Upwork profile, your Fiverr account, wherever. The point of a portfolio is to be sales collateral.
But having sales collateral does not mean clients arrive automatically. This is the thing that frustrates me the most. People walk into the server, generate a portfolio with AI in an afternoon, host it for free somewhere, and announce that their portfolio is done, so now the world owes them clients. That is not how any of this works. A portfolio is one item in your sales collateral, among many. It still does not get you clients on its own.
So build it, yes. But set the right expectation. Do not confuse proof with channels. Your channels are the three I gave you: platforms, community and outreach, and network and referrals. Those are how you reach clients. Your portfolio is what you show them once you do. Two different things. Stop mixing them up.
It Takes Four to Twelve Months, Not One
People start this journey and tell themselves they will have a client in a month, maybe two.
Good luck.
Maybe you will. Maybe you are the rare 0.1%. But the other 99.9% of you reading this, be realistic.
4 to 12 months is the honest range for landing your first good client, and that number isn’t a guess. As someone who has not just freelanced on Upwork but actually worked at Upwork, and studied well over 1,000 freelancer profiles to pull these numbers, I can tell you it sits closer to 8 to 12 months for most people, depending on your skill set and the demand and supply in your niche. That is the time, money, and mental energy it actually takes.
So 4 to 12 months to land your first good client. I want to be precise here, because the word “good” is doing a lot of lifting. Anyone can get a client if you are willing to sell yourself for 50 cents an hour. Go ahead, that is always available.
I am talking about your first good client. Your first consistent client, the one who pays you a stable or serious income, the kind of relationship that lets you switch off your job and go full time, or properly kick off your career. That takes four to twelve months.
If you read those articles online promising your first client in a month, sure, you might get a client that pays you 10 bucks and does nothing for your life. I know so many people with genuinely great skills who settle for $5/hr because they fell for that advice and decided to become cheap labor. They never grow out of that mindset. They burn out, they hit a wall, and they stay stuck for years. If you want freelancing or an agency to be scalable and sustainable, you need good clients, and managing them well is its own skill. I have written about why your client is not your boss and how to handle milestones so you actually get paid. Go review those when you get there.
Don’t Rush Into an Agency
One more thing, because half the people asking this question are already dreaming about an agency. You should not be opening one unless you have already had real success on your own.
There is a whole Blueprint on this, so I won’t repeat all of it. The short version: do not go full agency until you are hitting a stable solo number. Generally I like to see somewhere around $1,500 to $2,000 a month if you are solo, and $2,500 to $3,500 a month if you have a family to support, because that covers your expenses, your growth, and the rest of it. These numbers need to hold true for at least the past 6 months of your earnings.
If you are not at that number on your own, or as a small operation that outsources here and there, don’t bother going full agency. You will not survive. You will either die immediately, or you will outsource everything and ship bad quality work.
And bad quality does not cut it anymore. With AI in the picture, working at scale demands high agency and genuinely good output. So that is the last piece of advice. Get yourself right before you build a team.
If Your Question Is Still “How Do I Get Clients”
So here we are at the end. If you joined the server, got handed this article because you asked how to get clients, and your question after reading all of it is still just “how do I get clients,” then I will say it plainly. It is a skill issue. GIT GUD.
I don’t mean that as an insult, even if it sounds like one. I mean you have to go and diagnose the real problem. “How do I get clients” is not a problem you can solve, because it isn’t specific enough to be one. We have the resources for that. Go read them, review them, and come back with a sharper question. Then I can actually help you.
Because I want you to walk away with one thing. You just joined, and to you I am some online stranger you have never met. Fair. But I have spent a long time doing this, and I built this community and wrote all this content for a reason. It exists exactly for people at your stage. The only thing I ask is that you respect the time it takes, your own and everyone else’s.
You want to build a business where clients value your time and pay you well for it? Then start by putting in the effort yourself. That is how you become someone whose time is worth paying for.
Go Study, Then Come Back
This article is my go-to response now. It is a standard reply, almost a bot command, for anyone who walks into the server asking the open question. Here is the Blueprint, here is Arc, here are the Resources. Three bodies of work, easily 40+ hours of content, everything I pointed to above gathered in one place. That is not me being lazy or cold. It is me refusing to waste both of our time answering something that isn’t a question. Work through it, diagnose yourself honestly, and then come back with a real question.
Arc Articles for You to Read
- The Roadmap If You Have No Skills
- Are You Really Skilled?
- Hunting for Opportunities
- Packaging Your Services: How to Build an Offer That Sells
- Your Client Is Not Your Boss: Client Management Fundamentals
- Make Your Name Matter
- Are You An Unethical Freelancer?
- Switch To Freelancing: Why Consider It?
- AI Is Your Competition
Blueprint Workshops for You to Review
- Basics of Starting an Agency
- Marketing 101 for Freelancers: Beyond Upwork and Fiverr
- Shining Under the Sun: How to Stand Out When Starting Out
- How to Network: High ROI vs Low ROI Networking
- You’re Doing Portfolios Wrong: Online Presence and Personal Branding
- Unlocking Freelance Success: Your Guide to Upwork FAQs
- Surviving the Feast and Famine Cycles of Freelancing
Resources for You to Explore
- Upwork Masterclass: In Depth Tutorial for Beginners
- Agency Starter Kit
- Project Requirement Documentation: Your Source of Truth
- Competitor Analysis and Market Research Template
- Salary Negotiation Strategy
- A Resume That Just Works
With or without my help – I wish you the best.
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