As a principal of one of the firms you might have contacted, I do want to applaud your perseverance and attitude. Let's face it, a lot of folks in your position

As a principal of one of the firms you might have contacted, I do want to applaud your perseverance and attitude. Let's face it, a lot of folks in your position would call in with the assumption that engagement selection is a one sided process (because they are the client, like at McDonalds). They then get offended when people don't want to drop what they're doing to help an unprepared client work through their design and business plan (for free of course, in the name of sales) just in time to turn them down. It can be very difficult to schedule the right resources even on a team large enough to work on several projects simultaneously. The demand right now is unprecedented. Most studios are getting cold called and emailed 5-8 times a week by people with vague ideas and $25k budgets. Obviously, we'd help if we could but we have a responsibility to the people we work with to be incredibly diligent about working with clients that seem like good bets. After all, in all of the videos you've seen you'll be bombarded with the notion that ideas are cheap, while execution is everything. One of the strangest things I deal with at Unspace is people who are confused as to why we charge what we charge, or folks that can't imagine why a multi-person, four month engagement might run over $100k. You know, you can't open a dollar store in a strip mall for $100k, so why would a top team build you a sophisticated infrastructure to run your entire business on for less? That all said, these are gripes. We love learning new things and working on new client engagements is a great way to get thrown into the deep end in domains we'd otherwise never get to touch. It can be hard to give everyone your time — most folks don't understand that I'm a developer, not a salesman — but I recently hired our first business development manager specifically so that we could give everyone that contacted us the benefit of the doubt. It's a courtesy and respect thing that is all too easily forgotten.