One great way to gain real experience and build yourself a visible portfolio is to contribute to open-source projects, particularly if you contribute to well-known repositories.

If you can build something yourself that others use, you might be on your way to your own business ;)

One of the bigger advantages of open-source contributions is that collaborative coding is very different from coding alone, and you will be forced to operate in alignment and to learn new ways of doing things - this alone has huge value when your skills are being evaluated, and you can look at it as unpaid internship / mentoring.