landing your first client

Author

Kevin Szabo
March 21, 2026

Sponsored by

A guy reached out to me last week and said something that stuck with me.

He said he had been trying to land his first ghostwriting client for two months and kept hitting the same wall.

I would ask to see examples of his work or results he had gotten for previous clients.

And because he was just starting out he had nothing to show them.

So the conversation would go quiet and he would be back to square one.

I get it bro.

I’ve been there.

And the honest answer I gave him is not the one most people want to hear-

because it requires doing something that feels uncomfortable before there is any guarantee it will pay off.

I told him to stop waiting for permission to prove himself.

AD BREAK 1: ROKU TV

How Jennifer Anniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Here is what that actually looked like for me when I was in his position.

I picked someone whose content I genuinely thought I could improve.

Not a massive account.

Just someone in my niche who was posting regularly but whose writing felt flat or unclear or like it was not connecting the way it could be.

I rewrote three of their recent posts the way I would have written them.

Tightened the hooks, sharpened the message, made them feel more like something a real person would stop and read.

Then I sent them a DM.

Not a pitch.

I just told them I had been following their content, that I thought they were building something worth paying attention to, and that I had put together a few rewrites of some recent posts just to show them what I was thinking.

No obligation.

I kept it simple.

They chose to use them or ignore them.

Most people do not do this because it feels like giving something away for free and getting nothing back.

But that way of thinking is wrong and dangerous.

What you are actually doing is manufacturing the proof you do not have yet.

AD BREAK 2:

Feel free to check out here for free:

Unlock The $4 Trillion Rent Roll: Compound Your Wealth Like the 1%

Institutional giants use the $4 trillion rental market to compound millions. Now you can too. mogul offers fractional ownership in elite rental properties with 18.8% average IRR and zero property management required. Secure your share of the wealth Wall Street once kept for itself.

Past performance isn't predictive; illustrative only. Investing risks principal; no securities offer. See important Disclaimers

You are creating a case study out of thin air by doing the work before anyone hired you to do it.

Two of the three people he did this with responded.

One of them hired him in a week.

Not because I he had a large portfolio.

Because I had already done the work and they could see exactly what they were paying for before they paid for it.

The risk on their end was almost zero and that made the decision easy.

The other thing I told him was to stop apologizing for being new.

Most people in his position walk into conversations leading with the fact that they are just starting out as if it is something to be ashamed of.

It is not. Every single person who is good at something was bad at it once and every person with a full client roster had a first client at some point. Being new does not mean being unqualified.

It just means you have not had the right opportunity yet.

What actually closes that first client is not a portfolio.

It is confidence in the work and a willingness to make it easy for the other person to say yes.

Free work or heavily discounted work for the right person in exchange for a genuine testimonial is not desperation. It is strategy.

That testimonial becomes the thing you show the next person and suddenly the conversation is completely different.

AD BREAK 3: hubspot

Check it out here:

The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.

This guide distills 10 AI strategies from industry leaders that are transforming marketing.

  • Learn how HubSpot's engineering team achieved 15-20% productivity gains with AI

  • Learn how AI-driven emails achieved 94% higher conversion rates

  • Discover 7 ways to enhance your marketing strategy with AI.

He messaged me three days after that conversation and told me he had sent five DMs using the approach I described. Two had responded.

One conversation was still going.

That is all it takes to get the door open.

You do not need a website, a portfolio, a case study document, or six months of experience.

You need to do the work for someone, do it well, and ask them to tell one other person about it.

Everything else gets built on top of that one first moment.

It is closer than most people think.

Talk soon.