Small projects for local customers:
In order to gain experience, in the first phase of my business I took any work I could get, so I could develop a portfolio. All of this work was simple, hand-coded html websites for very small businesses or organizations, including some simple graphic design (keep in mind, this was the early 2000s when you see the examples below :)
I also did Photoshop image manipulation work, a few logo designs, and even did a Flash animation video (unfortunately, Flash plugins are no longer supported, so I can't show this to you).
Here is the logo I designed for my own business...
...and here are a couple of homepages for websites I designed for clients:
But these small businesses couldn't afford to pay much for website designs and the hand-coding and artwork were time consuming to create, so this didn't generate the income I needed. As a result, I moved the business in a different direction.