How do you show you can ship software before anyone has paid you to? You build something, put it where people can see it, and write down what broke.

Marketing has the same problem, and engineers moving into it tend to assume it works differently. It doesn’t. The missing “client” is a smaller obstacle than it looks, because most of the tooling for marketing experiments is open to anyone.

The reframe

Treat a practice project like a small experiment with instrumentation. A reader evaluating your work is, in effect, asking three questions. Can you frame a problem? Can you execute? Can you tell whether it worked?

A client’s name answers none of those directly.…