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An Instagram DM became a freelance project, and the freelance project became a full-time role three months later. I wouldn't have predicted any of those steps.
I'd been working as a freelance brand designer in Buenos Aires for two years. The work was inconsistent. Some months were fine. Some weren't. I'd been thinking about going back to a studio environment for the routine and the team, but most of the studios I wanted to work at were either based in São Paulo or paying in pesos at rates I couldn't make work.
One Buenos Aires design studio was different. They were small, six people, and they paid in USD via Deel because most of their clients were US-based. They had a public Instagram where they posted their work for a specific recurring client, a US-based health tech company. I'd been following them for about a year.
I had a thought. What if the studio would be open to a small spec project? I picked their main public client and rebuilt three concept variations of how I'd reposition the brand. I was honest with myself about it: this was speculative, the studio almost certainly hadn't asked for my opinion, and I was just going to send it as a portfolio piece, not a job application.
I DMed the founder. The message was three sentences. I'd been following the work, I'd built three variations of how I'd approach a brand refresh for the public client, did she have ten minutes to look at it? I attached a single Figma link.
She replied two hours later. The variations weren't what they were going to ship, she was direct about that, but they were the kind of work she wanted to be commissioning, and was I available for a one-off project they'd been needing to outsource? I was.
The project was a brand refresh for a different client. Three weeks of work. Five-figure fee, paid in USD. I shipped it on time. The client signed off without revisions, which is rare.
A month later the founder asked if I was open to a longer engagement. We agreed on a three-month rolling contract. After two months she asked if I'd consider going full-time. The role was permanent, paid in USD via Deel, and would mean working with the studio's existing six-person team rather than continuing as a contractor.
The offer was US$30,000 base. A number that doesn't look like much in dollar terms but works at the current exchange rate and is meaningfully better than what I'd have made independently. I asked for US$36,000, citing the depth of the work I'd already shipped and the cost of switching from contractor to employee structure. They came back at US$36,000.
I accepted. I'd sent two real applications during the entire search. Both went to job boards and both went unanswered. The Instagram DM was the application. I keep telling other designers that the studios you actually want to work at hire from their DMs, not from their job listings. They mostly don't believe me until they try it.
Fresh out of a coding bootcamp, I treated the job hunt like a numbers game with a twist. I knew I didn't have a CS degree or years of experience to lean on, so the one edge I could build was making it personal. Instead of dropping resumes into application portals and watching them vanish into black holes, I cold-emailed real engineers and hiring managers at the companies I actually wanted to work at. I spent evenings tracking down contact details on LinkedIn, personal blogs, and GitHub profiles, then writing emails that referenced specific projects or posts so they didn't read like spam. I sent over 150 of those and got a 22% response rate, far better than anything the portals gave me.
Across roughly three months, I reached out to 291 companies total and turned that into 32 phone screens. Some weeks I had five or six calls stacked up, and I kept a spreadsheet tracking where each one stood. The rejection rate was brutal and relentless. Plenty of calls ended with "we're looking for someone more senior" or just went silent after what felt like a good conversation. There were stretches where I wondered whether the bootcamp had been a mistake. But the pipeline stayed full because I kept the outreach volume high even when my confidence wasn't.
The other thing that helped was how I sequenced my onsites. I scheduled interviews at companies I was less excited about first, so I could get the rust off, work through the nerves, and figure out where I was stumbling before walking into the rooms that mattered to me. By the time I interviewed at the company at the top of my list, I had 90 days of reps behind me and it showed. I landed a full-time software engineering role there at $95,000. The big takeaway: a personal email to a human beats a polished application into a void, and ordering your interviews from low-stakes to high-stakes is one of the most underrated edges a junior candidate can build.
I'd been watching a US software company for a few months before I made my move. They were clearly building toward Latin America. Blog posts hinted at regional plans, a couple of Spanish-language social posts felt like they were testing the waters, and the job board listed nothing in the region yet. So rather than wait for a posting that might never come, I spent a weekend writing a one-page pitch aimed straight at their CEO. My argument was that expanding into LATAM without a Spanish-fluent full-stack developer embedded in the timezone was a real execution risk, and that I was the person to close that gap. I kept it tight, specific to their product, and sent it cold on a Tuesday morning.
He replied the same day, and we had a call scheduled within 48 hours. That response time told me the timing had landed. What followed was four rounds of interviews over about a month, in a format unlike anything I'd done before. The founder runs an async-first organization, so there were no synchronous technical interviews at all. Instead I recorded Loom walkthroughs of my approach to two architecture problems and submitted written exercises that had me think through a localization strategy for one of their core features. It was slower and more careful than a typical panel loop, but it suited the way I work. I had room to think things through rather than perform under artificial pressure, and I think that showed in my answers.
The offer came in at USD 65,000 for a full-time, on-site role in Buenos Aires, with quarterly meet-ups in Mexico City. The on-site structure made sense given the regional mandate. Being physically present in BA was the whole point of the pitch. At that salary in Buenos Aires the purchasing power is strong, so while the number isn't the ceiling of the market, the real-world value made it easy to accept. Thirty-one days from first email to signed offer. I accepted the same afternoon I got it.
The freelance piece I pitched in March became a full-time role in June. The thing that made it work was that I never asked them for a job.
I'd wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years earlier. They were a serious publication, long-form, edited, careful about facts, and they paid their writers, which is increasingly rare. I'd read every issue I could find for a year before I tried to do anything about it.
When I started job-hunting, it didn't go well. I sent thirty applications across three months, mostly to content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" rather than journalism. I got two interviews, one of which was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the search. A content marketing manager told me, plainly, that the role was generating SEO content with the help of an LLM and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better".
I went home that night and decided to stop applying for content jobs and just write the kind of piece I wanted to be paid to write.
I picked two ideas I thought the magazine would actually publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that had been gradually transformed by remote workers. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote three-paragraph pitches for each and emailed them to the editor.
She replied to one. The neighbourhood piece. She liked the angle, she'd been considering pitches on the same beat, and she was willing to commission a 1,500-word draft on spec. The fee was €200, paid within thirty days of publication.
I wrote it. Took ten days. The edit was thorough, she pushed back on three sections and I rewrote them. The piece ran in the May issue.
In late May, two months after the freelance piece had been agreed, the editor emailed me. They'd opened a permanent staff writer role and she wanted to talk before posting it. The shortlist was already her, the editor-in-chief and the publisher. The "interview" was a forty-minute conversation about the work I wanted to do, what I was reading, and one piece in the magazine I'd have edited differently.
The "test" was a 600-word writeup on a topic she gave me the next day. I had two days. I wrote eight hundred words, cut a hundred and fifty, sent it. They sent the offer two days later.
The offer was €26,000 base, which is staff-writer money in Spain and is fine. I asked for €30,000, citing the freelance work I'd already done for them and the fact that I'd be running their newsletter as part of the role. They came back at €28,000 plus a small monthly stipend for assignment travel. I accepted.
What worked: writing the kind of piece I wanted them to pay me for, before they were paying me. The freelance work was the interview. The actual interview was a formality.
30Applications
2Interviews
4 monthsSearch length
Cold outreachSource
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