My Personal Opinion on Landing Your First Client with No Portfolio
In my personal opinion, cold outreach to sell your AI solutions with no prior credibility (testimonials, reviews, recommendations, etc.) or proof-of-work (case studies, stats, sales, etc.) is very unlikely to work, or the ROI is really low. Instead, I would suggest going to communities, forums, and subreddits where business owners in your target niche hang out. Then, engage in conversations, ask questions (avoid generic ones), give value, and build solutions for some of them for free, especially the ones you know will benefit the most from it. For example, building a lead capturing chatbot for a client who gets 1000 site visitors a day will benefit more than someone who only gets 100 visitors. The most important part of this strategy is to build the solution first before even pitching the idea or asking if they want it. Just lead with the final product. If they like it, great. Ask for their testimonial and move on to the next client. If they don't like it, you can still make it a case study and use it in your portfolio. I've made some of the same mistakes that I discussed in this post. So, don't worry about messing up and changing paths as you go.