Make Money with Figma: Building a Portfolio Without Real Projects

A message showed up on Instagram at close to midnight: "Did you actually work with [company name] on their redesign? Saw it on your Behance, looks great." I hadn't worked with them. I'd redesigned their checkout flow on my own, uninvited, purely as practice.

I cleared up the confusion. He hired me anyway. Rs 6,850 for a six-screen booking app UI, delivered over what turned into eleven days instead of the seven I'd quoted.

That project is basically where this whole thing started actually paying.

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Knowing design and having nothing to prove it

I'd picked up UI design mostly through YouTube and a scattering of free courses, moving over from a general graphic design interest. The tools weren't the hard part. The hard part was that every portfolio site I looked at was full of real client logos and case studies, and I had a folder of college poster assignments.

I genuinely considered giving up on the freelance angle entirely at one point, figuring the field just required connections I didn't have.

Then I came across a thread where someone mentioned "concept redesigns" as a legitimate way to build a portfolio from nothing. Decided to actually test whether that held up.

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Three concepts, three different reasons

First one: a regional grocery delivery app I used weekly and found genuinely frustrating, mostly the checkout screen, which buried the promo code field somewhere illogical. I redesigned that flow with a cleaner, three-step checkout.

Second: a popular fitness app whose onboarding took something like eleven separate screens before you could even see the dashboard. I cut that down to four.

The third wasn't a redesign at all. It was an original concept, a small digital catalog app idea for a neighborhood library that doesn't actually have one. Fully invented, no existing product to reference against.

Each case study included the actual problem I was solving, rough wireframes, and then final screens, not just polished end results with no context behind them.

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Where I actually went wrong

The grocery app redesign originally just said "Grocery App Checkout Redesign" as the title. No disclaimer anywhere that it was unsolicited or unaffiliated. That's exactly what led to the confused Instagram message.

Every case study now opens with a line that reads something like: "Unsolicited concept project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by [company]." Small addition, but it removes the ambiguity entirely.

The second mistake was cramming too much into single projects, something like sixteen or seventeen screens in one case study early on. Nobody scrolled through all of it. I trimmed that down to five or six screens that actually demonstrate a real decision, not filler.

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How the first paid job actually happened

After that Instagram exchange, he asked if I'd design the UI for his small startup's booking app. We settled on Rs 6,850 for six screens, originally quoted at seven days.

The brief he gave me was two words: "modern" and "clean." Not much to work with, honestly. Two rounds of revisions happened because what I considered modern wasn't quite what he had pictured in his head.

To be fair, that's a fairly normal problem. Everyone has a different mental image of what those words mean, and it rarely translates cleanly from a client's head into a brief. I now ask for two or three reference apps on the very first call, before opening Figma at all.

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What the routine looks like these days

I try to finish one new concept project every couple of weeks when paid work is slow. It keeps the portfolio looking active instead of frozen at whatever I finished six months ago.

It's the same underlying logic as building a GitHub portfolio with no client history: if the real proof doesn't exist yet, build something honest that demonstrates the skill, and label it clearly for what it is.

About eight months in, total earnings from design freelancing sit around Rs 31,200, spread across several small projects. Nothing dramatic yet. But it's real money that wouldn't exist without those first three fabricated, honestly labeled projects.

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Started sketching a new concept last night, a donation tracking app for a fictional local NGO, purely made up for the exercise. No idea yet whether it turns into anything or just sits in the portfolio as one more example. Either outcome is fine at this point.