- First contact
- July — one cold email, drafted from an Orty fit score and reasoning
- Silence
- Six weeks, no reply
- Outcome
- Paid test at $10–15 per video, room toward $15–20 in steady rhythm
- Capacity
- Part-time, 4–5 hours a day — realistically 1–2 finished shorts per day
The pitch
I used Orty to pitch a prospective client back in July. Dropped in her profile, got a fit score and reasoning, and used the drafted pitch as my starting point: here's what I do, here's my style, want a free sample edit so you can see the difference?
She said yes.
The sample
I sent over a full sample edit — pacing cleanup, typography, sound design, the works. She gave me honest feedback: liked the effort on removing dead pauses, wasn't a fan of some of my sound effect and transition choices. Fair critique. Then she told me she had other priorities going on and would circle back when she was ready.
Six weeks of silence
Then, out of nowhere, an email: she'd been busy, was finally settling back in, and wanted to know if I'd be a good fit to help with her editing. We scheduled a call.
The call
On the call, she walked me through something that mattered more than I expected: another editor had reached out to her too, with a technically good sample — but it didn't match her actual style, and that editor didn't want to hop on a call to talk it through. She told me directly that what stood out to her about me wasn't just the edit — it was that I was upfront about my mistakes and limitations instead of overselling myself.
We talked hours, output, and budget. I can work part-time, 4–5 hours a day, which realistically means 1–2 finished shorts per day. We landed on $10–15 per video for a paid test, with room to move toward $15–20 once we're in a steady rhythm.
Why I'm writing this down
This whole process — the guessing, the manual profile research, the wondering whether a lead is even worth the time it takes to write a custom pitch — is exactly the problem I built Orty to solve. This story predates the tool. It's the reason the tool exists.
I don't have a big lesson to wrap this up with. I sent an email, someone said yes, it went quiet, and then it didn't. That's most of freelance outreach, honestly — you send more emails than turn into anything, and the ones that come back sometimes take longer than you'd like.
— Rayene