What it comes down to is being able to highlight the experience you do have while building new experiences.

So it sounds like you've built a small portfolio and have 1+ year of professional experience. At this point, just apply to startups, you will probably hear back!

The general recommendations to get into a specific aspect of software are, as others have mentioned: open source contributions, personal projects that are relevant to the core business, consulting or contracting work that is relative, and meetups/conferences.

I mentioned a lot of these things in this article: https://www.algodaily.com/lessons/getting-your-first-softwar...