Two reviews and nothing since, how do you get past nobody hiring you because nobody has hired you

I did two pieces of free work for exposure in my first month, and neither client left a review because there was no transaction to review. All I got was two case studies I was not allowed to show. If you do anything below rate, make sure it still runs through the normal process end to end so it produces the artifact you actually needed.

What moved the needle for me was three small, fast, low risk jobs in a single narrow category rather than three unrelated ones, because the reviews then said the same thing three times and read as a specialism instead of as a resume. Recency matters more than volume in my experience, and a review from last week beats twenty from two years ago. After the third one in the same category the invites started arriving instead of me chasing.

Rough numbers from my first quarter: about forty proposals, three replies, one job. That one job took five hours, produced a specific review naming what I did, and directly led to the next four enquiries because clients quoted it back to me. The funnel is genuinely that brutal at the start and it is not a sign you are doing it wrong.

I would not go cheap for the reviews, and I say that having done it. Do a small piece of work at your real rate instead, something scoped to a few hours so the client's risk is low even though the rate is not. Discounting to get started sets your position in the market on day one, and the clients who buy on price leave the least useful reviews anyway.

Narrow the category, raise the price, shorten the proposal. Volume of applications is not the constraint you think it is.

Bring proof from outside the platform, because the platform is not the only place trust comes from. A simple page with three worked examples, before and after, plus two former colleagues willing to be named as references, closed more work for me than my review count ever did.