The confidentiality tightrope of working with many clients
My most convincing sales pitch is a project I'm legally forbidden to describe. When you build under NDA for several companies, discretion stops being legal hygiene and becomes the product.
My most convincing sales pitch is a project I’m legally forbidden to describe.
That’s the strange shape of building software for several companies at once. A prospective client wants proof you can do the thing. The best proof you have is the thing you just built for someone else, who is quite possibly their competitor, under an agreement that says you won’t breathe a word of it. Your strongest evidence is the one story you can’t tell. You learn to live on that tightrope, or you don’t get to work this way at all.
What it changes about how you show up
The instinct, especially early, is to list your logos. Resist it. When you hold several NDAs at once, no client should be able to reverse-engineer who else you work with from your own website. That single rule quietly reshapes everything about how you present yourself.
- Anonymize every project. “A logistics platform,” not the name. “A B2B payments system,” not the brand. The lesson is the asset, not the client it came from.
- Name only what’s yours. Your own past ventures, the things you co-founded and can speak for, those you can say out loud. Everything done for someone else stays generic.
- Describe yourself by the work, not the arrangement. “I build logistics and payments software,” not “freelancer,” not “available for hire.” Lead with what you make, and the discretion takes care of itself.
None of this is hiding. It’s the opposite. It’s being legible about your craft while staying silent about your clients, which is far harder than just oversharing or going dark.
Telling true stories with the threads pulled out
The skill underneath all of it is one I’ve had to practice on purpose: telling a true, useful story with every identifying thread removed. The bug was real. The fix was real. The 3am demo that fell over was very real. But the company, the market specifics, the names, the numbers that would point a finger, those come out before the story goes anywhere public.
Discretion isn’t just legal hygiene. For someone who works with many clients, it is the product. People trust you with the next thing precisely because you said nothing about the last one.
And here’s the quiet payoff: this very post is the rule in action. Everything I write here about systems I’ve built is a lesson with the serial numbers filed off. If I do it well, you get something you can use on Monday, and not one of my clients can tell I was talking about them. That’s the whole tightrope. Useful and unidentifiable, at the same time, every time.