You should never work for free, is what all the YouTube and TikTok financial and entrepreneurial gurus will tell you, and they are correct. Well sort of. This kind of statement is very dependent on the current stage that you are in as an entrepreneur. The earlier stage that you are in, the less true this statement is. A better way to rephrase this is that it becomes more true as you progress.
Why I am working for free
How I got here
At the time of writing, I am going to create three free home page designs for two businesses. There is supposed to be a third, but they haven't filled out the form yet. I created a post in a mastermind Facebook group offering to create a free homepage design for anyone interested.
The benefit
I was originally going to make up fake clients with fake requirements to practice my UI design skills. When you think about it though, there is no better practice than actually doing it for real for real companies. You would be surprised at how different the businesses you are doing free work for end up being. two of the people interested had coaching businesses. The third was a video studio that focused on opticians. Neither of these three had I thought about when I was thinking up of fake clients.
Because I suck
I am just starting out learning web design. Because I am just starting out learning this skill, I know that I suck. The only way that I can get better is by doing more. There is no faster way to learn a new skill that just doing it a bunch of times. Doing work for free is an easy way to get repetitions in, practice selling, and communicating with people.