I wanted to share some things I wish someone could have told me when I started out in design and development. I am by no means saying that these are definitive, nor should you take my advice, but I hope that some of these may give you a little advice on how to approach a certain situation you come across over the next few years.
*** University alone will not get you a job
Although university is great for teaching you some of the essentials in design and development, they will not actually get you a job. The job market for students straight out of university / college is the most competitive, so you need to differ yourself from the next applicant.
During university is the perfect time to build up your portfolio. (and your bank account) Put yourself out there, ask around for people who need work doing, introduce yourself and your skills to that local restaurant, shop, anything. Employers want to see examples of how you can apply yourself to real world situations.
If you can’t get someone to do work for, then come up with a concept project. If you are a designer, design a poster for your favourite band, redesign a website of a brand you like. If you are a developer, think about a plugin that could be useful, develop an app. The more examples of how you can apply yourself differs you from the next applicant.
*** It is ok to say NO
This is one of those things that I definitely didn’t do in the early days of my career, now don’t get me wrong, there are certain occasions where you need to make compromises. However, one thing you need to understand is that it is perfectly fine to say no to a clients demands. There are a number of reasons why saying no can be so much more productive, than just agreeing to all demands. There are a lot of articles on this subject, so I thought here are a few links to have a browse over instead of covering old ground.
http://alistapart.com/article/no-one-nos-learning-to-say-no-to-bad-ideas
http://blog.jpdesigntheory.com/learning-to-say-no-to-bad-freelance-projects/
*** Sweat the details!
The details are the parts of projects that will get you noticed by your peers. In fact, I would say that these finer things in projects are what really hit home the potential and vision that you have as a designer or developer.
Take a step back and really think about every detail your project has to offer, time will always be tight, deadlines will always be bearing down on you. However, if you can add just one thing to a project that will make your peers step back and go “Nice, he thought about ...” The prospects for that place on the cool project coming in next month are increasing every time.
*** There will always be someone better than you
If you want to progress and become a better designer / developer, there is something you have to do right this minute… Put your ego to one side!
Embrace contribution, criticism and advice now. You will never be the best at something, there is always someone you will be able soak up a bit of knowledge from. Having an ego will only limit your progression up the ladder.
*** Sharing nothing, gets you nothing
Don’t be afraid of putting things out there, that idea is never going to get any feedback sat on your computer. Get it on the internet, get criticism on your work, it will only make you better at what you do. Hell, it can even lead to more work if people dig it. It can be very nerve-racking at first getting feedback, don’t get your back up if it’s not great, just use it to your advantage on your next piece.
So hopefully the above may have given you a few little things you can take away and put into practice, the main thing you need to take away from this is to create for the love of it. Don’t always think about your pocket or bank balance, money led projects are easy to spot, enjoy what you do.
Do you want to know the difference between the folks who are constantly creating new things, selling their ideas as products and making money doing what they want to be doing… and everyone else?
It’s easy—they put in the work required to make those things happen. They show up and work. Even (or especially) if they don’t feel like it or want to.
Making something part of your daily routine is a huge step towards shipping what you create. Most writers I know commit to writing 500-1000 words a day. Every day. Even when they’re busy/tired/uninspired. They make a promise to themselves to put the work in.
What’s the point of doing that? You can train yourself to be better at “being creative on-demand”. And this is truly a wonderful thing. It makes it easier and faster to create more of what you enjoy creating.
It doesn’t mean every time you sit down to work at your craft you magically shoot rainbows and unicorns out your ass, but it does mean that the more hours you put in, the more likely you are to get two things. The first is the more work you put into something, the more likely you are to get better at it. The second is the more time you put into something, the closer you’ll get to completing it.
Obviously there are limitations to this. You can’t work 24/7 at something and expect the result to be great. Our bodies weren’t meant to run continuously—they require sleep, food, downtime and even fun. Creative batteries need recharging. But committing to working at something every single day is the best and simplest way to get from idea to launch.
Do you want to know the difference between the folks who are constantly creating new things, selling their ideas as products and making money doing what they want to be doing… and everyone else?
It’s easy—they put in the work required to make those things happen. They show up and work. Even (or especially) if they don’t feel like it or want to.
Making something part of your daily routine is a huge step towards shipping what you create. Most writers I know commit to writing 500-1000 words a day. Every day. Even when they’re busy/tired/uninspired. They make a promise to themselves to put the work in.
What’s the point of doing that? You can train yourself to be better at “being creative on-demand”. And this is truly a wonderful thing. It makes it easier and faster to create more of what you enjoy creating.
It doesn’t mean every time you sit down to work at your craft you magically shoot rainbows and unicorns out your ass, but it does mean that the more hours you put in, the more likely you are to get two things. The first is the more work you put into something, the more likely you are to get better at it. The second is the more time you put into something, the closer you’ll get to completing it.
Obviously there are limitations to this. You can’t work 24/7 at something and expect the result to be great. Our bodies weren’t meant to run continuously—they require sleep, food, downtime and even fun. Creative batteries need recharging. But committing to working at something every single day is the best and simplest way to get from idea to launch.
You would not believe that we struggled this week if you would see how much code was written and pixels were drawn. All three of us struggled with our own tasks:
Wouter had a fight with the overall design of Gibbon and after 13 iterations still wasn’t satisfied with the way it looked.
Joeri couldn’t get a lightbox with your login form to automatically close and redirect you.
I was trying to get the building blocks for the API as perfect as possible so I could build the rest on top of it.
We all know the problem, we stop progressing because we don’t know how to get it perfect. I remember reading about the following experiment in “Art and Fear” from David Bayles:
The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
We stop working on the main problem because we don’t believe we have sufficiently solved a small problem. The small problem is prohibiting us from doing any work.
Late Sunday evening Wouter send us a message saying that he still wasn’t sure if this was the right design, but that “his time was up, the mojo was gone, and this was it”.
The ball was in Joeri’s court. He needed to convert the design made by Wouter into templates and make sure that all the static content was generated by the Gibbon engine we separately build.
After only two days – thanks to wunderkind Joeri – Wouter was able to play around with the website and see how his design worked in a living, breathing application. Immediately, Wouter got his mojo back because he was able to keep working. Small iterations inspire great solutions.
Most of the time the best thing to say when you are stuck is “this is good enough”. This enables you to proceed with solving the main problem, instead of getting stuck on the details. The best ideas come when you keep working.
Joeri completed his login box after going for the next best solution. Turned out that this solution was better than his initial one. I decided to stop making abstractions and first make sure that everything in the API works. Wouter is working on his best design yet.
At Gibbon we don’t ship something if it’s just good enough. But, saying “good enough” while building enables us to have something great in the end. Avoid getting stuck on the small problems by saying good enough for now. Keep working and increase your chances that in the end you will be able to say: “close to perfect”.
You would not believe that we struggled this week if you would see how much code was written and pixels were drawn. All three of us struggled with our own tasks:
Wouter had a fight with the overall design of Gibbon and after 13 iterations still wasn’t satisfied with the way it looked.
Joeri couldn’t get a lightbox with your login form to automatically close and redirect you.
I was trying to get the building blocks for the API as perfect as possible so I could build the rest on top of it.
We all know the problem, we stop progressing because we don’t know how to get it perfect. I remember reading about the following experiment in “Art and Fear” from David Bayles:
The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
We stop working on the main problem because we don’t believe we have sufficiently solved a small problem. The small problem is prohibiting us from doing any work.
Late Sunday evening Wouter send us a message saying that he still wasn’t sure if this was the right design, but that “his time was up, the mojo was gone, and this was it”.
The ball was in Joeri’s court. He needed to convert the design made by Wouter into templates and make sure that all the static content was generated by the Gibbon engine we separately build.
After only two days – thanks to wunderkind Joeri – Wouter was able to play around with the website and see how his design worked in a living, breathing application. Immediately, Wouter got his mojo back because he was able to keep working. Small iterations inspire great solutions.
Most of the time the best thing to say when you are stuck is “this is good enough”. This enables you to proceed with solving the main problem, instead of getting stuck on the details. The best ideas come when you keep working.
Joeri completed his login box after going for the next best solution. Turned out that this solution was better than his initial one. I decided to stop making abstractions and first make sure that everything in the API works. Wouter is working on his best design yet.
At Gibbon we don’t ship something if it’s just good enough. But, saying “good enough” while building enables us to have something great in the end. Avoid getting stuck on the small problems by saying good enough for now. Keep working and increase your chances that in the end you will be able to say: “close to perfect”.
If you’re running a lean startup, “launch and learn” is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that’s a potentially make-or-break issue. Our design studio works with dozens of startups each year to help teams define their products and features. Through the process of doing this over and over again, we’ve collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier and then adapt their plans more nimbly. The result is almost always that they ship better products and do so even faster.
*** Clickable mockups
Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. We’ve done this with companies like HomeAway, AVOS, and Duo Security by designing a few screens in a flow and then building a clickable version, using basic consumer software tools like InVision or Apple’s Keynote.
At first I thought these prototypes would be too rough to be useful. But time after time I’ve seen customers engage with click-throughs like they’re real products, and that helps you learn if the designs are working. It’s a great method to use before engineering starts to build a design.
*** Customer interviews
Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people who you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.
It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.
If you want to know more, we created a research guide with plenty of tactical tips for finding and interviewing customers. Now you have no excuse. Get out of the building! (Then come back — there’s more good stuff below.)
*** Fake doors
You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. We did this with CustomMade, a startup that lets people order custom-built products. Our idea was to let visitors save others’ projects for inspiration. But instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we new were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement. For more on fake doors, see Jess Lee’s excellent talk.
*** Recon
When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.
So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.
*** Micro-surveys
Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.
We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.
And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. Here’s more on micro-surveys.
*** Prototype with real data
Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.
When we were designing coupon pages with RetailMeNot, we needed real coupon data in order to evaluate our designs. So we built a prototype in two days. It was buggy and didn’t have many features, but it was just enough to get useful feedback from customers. And it was good we did, because it turned out that half our ideas weren’t working.
We iterated three more times, building prototypes and showing to customers, and were able to get to a design that improved both usability and click-through rates. Few startups build true prototypes, but it’s an immensely useful way to learn fast.
*** Site visits
Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.
Recently, we were working with Foundation Medicine to improve their clinical cancer genomics reports. So we decided to visit oncology centers, watch how doctors used the reports, and see what we could learn. We were surprised to discover that the reports we’d worked so hard to design were often received by fax. Tiny text was hard to read and all color information was lost. It was an easy problem to fix, but we only noticed it through a site visit.
*** Learn more, build less
Being a lean startup means that we should first consider all these ways to learn, and then pick the fastest, cheapest method. I’ve listed seven methods that we’ve found work well at startups, but there are plenty more out there. Once you start looking, you’ll be surprised at the variety of ways you can learn incredibly fast, saving you and your team precious time and money (and heartache).
Some time ago a rather large US entertainment company bought a few licenses for my HTML5 Game Engine Impact. They used it for internal prototyping and, as they told me, were quite happy with it.
A few month later I got an email from the company's legal department. They asked me to sign an amendment to the Impact Software license agreement with three additional terms. I assume they wanted to publish a game they made with Impact.
The first term stated that I would not be allowed to use their company's name in marketing material. Fine with me. I wouldn't do that without asking beforehand anyway.
The other two terms however felt a bit strange.
But let's back off for a second. As you may know, I'm the sole author of Impact. I'm based in Germany and self employed. It's a one man show. I'm providing Impact without any warranty and I'm not liable for any damages my software may cause (6. & 7. in the license agreement). Pretty standard.
Now, the license amendment I was to sign stated that my software "does not use, embed or incorporate any software which is subject to any open source or other similar types of license terms". What? Why? How? Is there any software out there that truly honors this term?
At this point it's already clear that I can't sign this. Impact uses John Resig's Simple Inheritance, Array.erase and Function.bind as found in MooTools, parts of DOMReady as found in jQuery and some more snippets and boilerplate code that I would consider public domain.
Typical Huge Company™ I thought. Kind of cute.
The last term however is where it gets truly frightening. In short, I would be held liable for "all damages, liabilities, losses, costs and expenses (including attorneys' fees) relating to any claim, action, suit or proceeding brought by a third party based on any actual or alleged infringement or misappropriation of such third party's intellectual property rights in connection with the use of the software." This goes on for a few more paragraphs.
Let's ignore for a minute that this legalese is written so vaguely that I could be held liable if the company published a game, using my game engine, with art assets they stole from another company. Let's ignore that this multi-billion-dollar company only bought software worth a few hundred USD from me, yet they still want me to pay their legal fees. Ignore that.
The core of the problem is another one: The US Legal System and Patent Law.
Quite frankly, the US Legal System scares me. A Legal System that is vague enough, emotional enough to have spawned a whole subcategory of dramatic movies is not a good indicator for true justice. The notion that the party with more money wins a trial, the whole jury selection process, the fact that there even is a jury. It all seems so absurd from our perspective.
Maybe I have watched too many Hollywood movies. But maybe it really is like this. Just look at the recent Apple vs. Samsung case – a supposedly boring patent trial made convoluted and emotional.
If I ever get sued in the US, who knows what will happen. It's truly unpredictable.
And in the US there's always a reason to get sued. Impact probably (unknowingly) infringes a whole lot of US software patents. All trivial, all with prior art. Yet, proving so in a court case would absolutely ruin my business and me financially.
It's understandable that this entertainment company wanted me to sign their license amendment. It absolutely made sense from their perspective. They are deep in this circus and wanted a bit of certainty that their legal system couldn't provide.
I told them I couldn't sign their amendment and never heard back.
Sometimes I have the feeling that I'm missing out by not being in Silicon Valley, in the epicenter of Startup culture. I was there for a visit and it was extremely energizing and motivational. I loved the people, the mentality, the atmosphere. Instead, I'm in a small and boring town in Germany.
But then again, I feel safer here; I have the freedom to experiment, to innovate. I'm glad that we don't have impeding software patents. Glad that our Legal System is still sane. Glad that my business is based in Germany and not in the US.
If you’re running a lean startup, “launch and learn” is undoubtedly a familiar mantra. But launching a new feature can take weeks or even months, and for a scrappy startup that’s a potentially make-or-break issue. Our design studio works with dozens of startups each year to help teams define their products and features. Through the process of doing this over and over again, we’ve collected a time-tested toolkit of methods for learning that are cheap, fast, and perfect for startups to find those crucial mistakes earlier and then adapt their plans more nimbly. The result is almost always that they ship better products and do so even faster.
*** Clickable mockups
Most teams think they need to build an interface that functions and looks real before showing it to customers to get feedback. Nope. It turns out that if you string together a few simple mockups with clickable hot-spots, you can still get great feedback in a fraction of the time. We’ve done this with companies like HomeAway, AVOS, and Duo Security by designing a few screens in a flow and then building a clickable version, using basic consumer software tools like InVision or Apple’s Keynote.
At first I thought these prototypes would be too rough to be useful. But time after time I’ve seen customers engage with click-throughs like they’re real products, and that helps you learn if the designs are working. It’s a great method to use before engineering starts to build a design.
*** Customer interviews
Instead of working in a vacuum, gather data to use as fuel for designing your product. Specifically, go out and find the people who you think will use your product and talk with them about the problem(s) you’re aiming to solve. I know you’ve heard this a hundred times. Customer interviews are like flossing — everyone agrees it’s good for you, but it’s hard to build the habit.
It’s easy to get hung up on the details: How do you find people who will talk with you? What do you talk about? Relax. User researchers have been doing this stuff for decades, and there’s a wealth of knowledge about how to do it quickly and accurately. For starters, you can write a short survey called a screener to help you recruit the right people to talk to. Then, create an interview script to help guide the conversation.
If you want to know more, we created a research guide with plenty of tactical tips for finding and interviewing customers. Now you have no excuse. Get out of the building! (Then come back — there’s more good stuff below.)
*** Fake doors
You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. We did this with CustomMade, a startup that lets people order custom-built products. Our idea was to let visitors save others’ projects for inspiration. But instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we new were onto something and built the rest of the feature. After a few changes like that, we saw a 3x increase in engagement. For more on fake doors, see Jess Lee’s excellent talk.
*** Recon
When teams design a new product, they come to the table with all sorts of assumptions about the competition. It’s easy to look at another product and have an opinion about which parts are valuable and which parts are broken. But if you guess wrong, you might just copy a bunch of functionality that your customers don’t actually need.
So we like to think of competing products as free prototypes. We watch customers use these products and learn very quickly which features are loved, unusable, ignored, or hated. With this knowledge, we can make better decisions in product design, marketing, and sales.
*** Micro-surveys
Surveys are a tempting way to learn from the comfort and safety of your office chair. But designing a good survey is surprisingly tough. Whenever I talk with survey scientists, I’m overwhelmed by all the ways you can screw up a survey design and unknowingly get bad (read: useless) data. So when we run surveys, we stick to a pattern we know works well.
We put the survey as close as possible to the behavior we’re trying to study. For instance, if we’re interested in why a customer picked one of our pricing plans, we’ll ask them with a small pop-up survey in the moment, not an email that might get read days later.
And we rely on open-response questions that let us hear directly from customers. You’ll learn more from reading 100 short responses than knowing that 32 percent of users chose option B in your survey. Here’s more on micro-surveys.
*** Prototype with real data
Clickable mockups are a good first step, but you can learn even more when you build a prototype that integrates real data. You might be tempted to start building the actual product at this point. You might even call that work-in-progress a prototype. But it’s not. Building a real product always takes longer than you think. If you really want to learn fast, build a true prototype – one that you’re not afraid to throw away.
When we were designing coupon pages with RetailMeNot, we needed real coupon data in order to evaluate our designs. So we built a prototype in two days. It was buggy and didn’t have many features, but it was just enough to get useful feedback from customers. And it was good we did, because it turned out that half our ideas weren’t working.
We iterated three more times, building prototypes and showing to customers, and were able to get to a design that improved both usability and click-through rates. Few startups build true prototypes, but it’s an immensely useful way to learn fast.
*** Site visits
Go to wherever your customers are, and watch them actually use your product. I know that sounds like common sense (or it should). But it’s too easy to think we know our customers from all the meetings, phone calls, and reports we’ve read about them. To deeply understand how people actually use our products we need to go to where they work, where they play, and where they live.
Recently, we were working with Foundation Medicine to improve their clinical cancer genomics reports. So we decided to visit oncology centers, watch how doctors used the reports, and see what we could learn. We were surprised to discover that the reports we’d worked so hard to design were often received by fax. Tiny text was hard to read and all color information was lost. It was an easy problem to fix, but we only noticed it through a site visit.
*** Learn more, build less
Being a lean startup means that we should first consider all these ways to learn, and then pick the fastest, cheapest method. I’ve listed seven methods that we’ve found work well at startups, but there are plenty more out there. Once you start looking, you’ll be surprised at the variety of ways you can learn incredibly fast, saving you and your team precious time and money (and heartache).
Some time ago a rather large US entertainment company bought a few licenses for my HTML5 Game Engine Impact. They used it for internal prototyping and, as they told me, were quite happy with it.
A few month later I got an email from the company's legal department. They asked me to sign an amendment to the Impact Software license agreement with three additional terms. I assume they wanted to publish a game they made with Impact.
The first term stated that I would not be allowed to use their company's name in marketing material. Fine with me. I wouldn't do that without asking beforehand anyway.
The other two terms however felt a bit strange.
But let's back off for a second. As you may know, I'm the sole author of Impact. I'm based in Germany and self employed. It's a one man show. I'm providing Impact without any warranty and I'm not liable for any damages my software may cause (6. & 7. in the license agreement). Pretty standard.
Now, the license amendment I was to sign stated that my software "does not use, embed or incorporate any software which is subject to any open source or other similar types of license terms". What? Why? How? Is there any software out there that truly honors this term?
At this point it's already clear that I can't sign this. Impact uses John Resig's Simple Inheritance, Array.erase and Function.bind as found in MooTools, parts of DOMReady as found in jQuery and some more snippets and boilerplate code that I would consider public domain.
Typical Huge Company™ I thought. Kind of cute.
The last term however is where it gets truly frightening. In short, I would be held liable for "all damages, liabilities, losses, costs and expenses (including attorneys' fees) relating to any claim, action, suit or proceeding brought by a third party based on any actual or alleged infringement or misappropriation of such third party's intellectual property rights in connection with the use of the software." This goes on for a few more paragraphs.
Let's ignore for a minute that this legalese is written so vaguely that I could be held liable if the company published a game, using my game engine, with art assets they stole from another company. Let's ignore that this multi-billion-dollar company only bought software worth a few hundred USD from me, yet they still want me to pay their legal fees. Ignore that.
The core of the problem is another one: The US Legal System and Patent Law.
Quite frankly, the US Legal System scares me. A Legal System that is vague enough, emotional enough to have spawned a whole subcategory of dramatic movies is not a good indicator for true justice. The notion that the party with more money wins a trial, the whole jury selection process, the fact that there even is a jury. It all seems so absurd from our perspective.
Maybe I have watched too many Hollywood movies. But maybe it really is like this. Just look at the recent Apple vs. Samsung case – a supposedly boring patent trial made convoluted and emotional.
If I ever get sued in the US, who knows what will happen. It's truly unpredictable.
And in the US there's always a reason to get sued. Impact probably (unknowingly) infringes a whole lot of US software patents. All trivial, all with prior art. Yet, proving so in a court case would absolutely ruin my business and me financially.
It's understandable that this entertainment company wanted me to sign their license amendment. It absolutely made sense from their perspective. They are deep in this circus and wanted a bit of certainty that their legal system couldn't provide.
I told them I couldn't sign their amendment and never heard back.
Sometimes I have the feeling that I'm missing out by not being in Silicon Valley, in the epicenter of Startup culture. I was there for a visit and it was extremely energizing and motivational. I loved the people, the mentality, the atmosphere. Instead, I'm in a small and boring town in Germany.
But then again, I feel safer here; I have the freedom to experiment, to innovate. I'm glad that we don't have impeding software patents. Glad that our Legal System is still sane. Glad that my business is based in Germany and not in the US.
About a year ago, I was working full-time as a graphic designer for a pretty large company. Although I was making $42k a year, I didn’t feel like my time was valued.
I ended up losing my job when new management was brought in. On my last day, my new boss called me into his office to “chat,” I distinctly remember thinking “God, I hope I get fired.”
God was listening. Before I even sat down, a man I had only known for 2 weeks let me know I was getting let go. (This came only 2 months after receiving a raise for my ‘great performance with the company’ – go figure).
*** So I was back to having the same 3 career options that basically every designer has:
Work at an agency
Work at another company or startup
Freelance full-time
After meditating on my options, and laying out on the beach for a week, I came to the conclusion that I would try to make freelancing my full-time business.
In my first 6 months I ended up making about $30k. That may not seem like a lot to you, but it was a hugely liberating for me.
Here’s how I did it:
(Full disclosure: I took an online course called Earn1k and followed it precisely)
Edit: People wanted the link to earn1k. Here it is.
*** I began to look at my freelance like a strategic system for getting new clients.
I needed to stand out. Failure was not an option. I decided that if I was going to reach clients more effectively than the average designer online, I needed to have a better strategy.
So, I looked at all the freelance designer portfolios online – aka my competition. Most had good to great design, all with a similar look and the quality. Honestly, they were not too different from my work.
They all had very minimal copy, and usually a short designery phrase like, ”Pixel perfection,” or whatever. You know, you’ve seen them. Basically, sites like this: http://kerem.co/
Anyways, I came to the conclusion designers were focusing on portraying a “cool” image that they wanted to see in themselves, not exactly the professional, trustworthy image that potential clients wanted to see.
*** I decided I didn’t need a portfolio website.
If a potential client wanted to see my work, they would have to ask me directly, and I could send them a pdf. (I even deleted all but one of my dribbble shots).
This allowed me to keep track of every single person who wanted to see my work, (enough to merit an email to me anyway).
This also forced me to put an all new emphasis on the words I used in my emails, and eventually things like meetings, proposals, and other forms of communication typical to the client on boarding process.
*** I crafted an offer specifically designed for people I wanted to work with.
In order to do this I had to decide on my ideal client.
I looked at the online communities that were most in need of design, and had the ability to pay for my services. I decided to target Startups, because they seemed to have the biggest need.
They also fit perfectly in my price range, being that I was a young designer.
So, when I sat down to write my first emails, I avoided broad terms other designers might use to describe their work to a generic client like “great design.”
I decided to instead learn niche phrases to startup culture like “conversion rate optimization,” and “lead generation.”
*** One of the most effective things I did for my business during this time was focus on one thing: getting clients.
This is something that came easier for me because I ran a one person freelance business with a very clear goal – earn money by getting clients.
However, having laser focus on one goal is still something that most businesses should take note of. Especially if you have limited time.
It prioritized everything I did, because I was able to ask myself ‘is this directly helping me reach my goal?’ – at any point in my day.
This focus allowed all my energy and time to be dedicated on the most important thing to my business: making money.
Almost as important, it allowed me to see what areas were a total waste of time.
Things that weren’t directly helping me generate revenue were killed… this included; twitter, facebook, blogging, dribbble, reading emails etc.
*** It still came down to me contacting people directly.
Other things, like twitter, might work for some people, but I’m simply writing to say they didn’t work for me.
What worked was emailing people directly. I put together a script using the tailored offer I crafted and sent it out to hundreds of startups throughout the six months.
I used one site in particular for over 20k of my revenue, Folyo – a curated job board by Sacha Greif.
Of course there were other, less-prolific job boards like craigslist, freelance switch, and others, but the main idea was that I was using the same specific script to send out to many people.
It felt so much better than sitting on my laurels and just posting stuff on twitter or dribbble.
*** I stopped letting the success of my business depend on outside forces like others contacting me.
Because I did this, I was also able to track where my efforts were getting the biggest return.
I created an excel file, with an area for every source of lead I had. Every time I sent a new lead an email, I would update the file for that particular lead source.
Soon I was able to see which of these job boards were responding with the highest frequency (Folyo), and put all my effort into these sources.
I also prepared for the future. Whenever a lead would email me back even if just to let me know they were going with another designer, I would put them in a new folder – a pool of past leads to follow up with in the future.
*** This pool quickly became my most valued source for new work.
Starting and depending on my freelance business taught me that you can’t listen to what other people say will work for you.
If you do what everyone says you should do, you’ll be doing a little bit of everything.
As Ramit said in his course, “couldn’t hurt, could it? OF COURSE IT CAN HURT.”
To be a successful freelancer I needed to focus on one thing, getting more clients, not everything.
*** Constantly updating my portfolio website, tweeting, and posting dribbble shots, might have felt like I was working on my freelance business, but in the end it was just a distraction.
In the end, contacting people directly has has other benefits too, like allowing me to charge more.
I now know approximately how many leads I have to email in order to get a new client.
Do you know that number? How confident would you be if you did?
Reply in the comments, I’d love to discuss your freelance business. Before you ask why I post on this blog, it’s to network, share my experience, and help others – not make money.
Update: There’s been a backlash of comments from Designer News. I want to go ahead and point out that this is simply my experience, and I’m not saying portfolios are bad or you shouldn’t have one. I’m just saying I didn’t need one. Also, make sure you check out folyo, Earn1k if you’re a freelance designer.
About a year ago, I was working full-time as a graphic designer for a pretty large company. Although I was making $42k a year, I didn’t feel like my time was valued.
I ended up losing my job when new management was brought in. On my last day, my new boss called me into his office to “chat,” I distinctly remember thinking “God, I hope I get fired.”
God was listening. Before I even sat down, a man I had only known for 2 weeks let me know I was getting let go. (This came only 2 months after receiving a raise for my ‘great performance with the company’ – go figure).
*** So I was back to having the same 3 career options that basically every designer has:
Work at an agency
Work at another company or startup
Freelance full-time
After meditating on my options, and laying out on the beach for a week, I came to the conclusion that I would try to make freelancing my full-time business.
In my first 6 months I ended up making about $30k. That may not seem like a lot to you, but it was a hugely liberating for me.
Here’s how I did it:
(Full disclosure: I took an online course called Earn1k and followed it precisely)
Edit: People wanted the link to earn1k. Here it is.
*** I began to look at my freelance like a strategic system for getting new clients.
I needed to stand out. Failure was not an option. I decided that if I was going to reach clients more effectively than the average designer online, I needed to have a better strategy.
So, I looked at all the freelance designer portfolios online – aka my competition. Most had good to great design, all with a similar look and the quality. Honestly, they were not too different from my work.
They all had very minimal copy, and usually a short designery phrase like, ”Pixel perfection,” or whatever. You know, you’ve seen them. Basically, sites like this: http://kerem.co/
Anyways, I came to the conclusion designers were focusing on portraying a “cool” image that they wanted to see in themselves, not exactly the professional, trustworthy image that potential clients wanted to see.
*** I decided I didn’t need a portfolio website.
If a potential client wanted to see my work, they would have to ask me directly, and I could send them a pdf. (I even deleted all but one of my dribbble shots).
This allowed me to keep track of every single person who wanted to see my work, (enough to merit an email to me anyway).
This also forced me to put an all new emphasis on the words I used in my emails, and eventually things like meetings, proposals, and other forms of communication typical to the client on boarding process.
*** I crafted an offer specifically designed for people I wanted to work with.
In order to do this I had to decide on my ideal client.
I looked at the online communities that were most in need of design, and had the ability to pay for my services. I decided to target Startups, because they seemed to have the biggest need.
They also fit perfectly in my price range, being that I was a young designer.
So, when I sat down to write my first emails, I avoided broad terms other designers might use to describe their work to a generic client like “great design.”
I decided to instead learn niche phrases to startup culture like “conversion rate optimization,” and “lead generation.”
*** One of the most effective things I did for my business during this time was focus on one thing: getting clients.
This is something that came easier for me because I ran a one person freelance business with a very clear goal – earn money by getting clients.
However, having laser focus on one goal is still something that most businesses should take note of. Especially if you have limited time.
It prioritized everything I did, because I was able to ask myself ‘is this directly helping me reach my goal?’ – at any point in my day.
This focus allowed all my energy and time to be dedicated on the most important thing to my business: making money.
Almost as important, it allowed me to see what areas were a total waste of time.
Things that weren’t directly helping me generate revenue were killed… this included; twitter, facebook, blogging, dribbble, reading emails etc.
*** It still came down to me contacting people directly.
Other things, like twitter, might work for some people, but I’m simply writing to say they didn’t work for me.
What worked was emailing people directly. I put together a script using the tailored offer I crafted and sent it out to hundreds of startups throughout the six months.
I used one site in particular for over 20k of my revenue, Folyo – a curated job board by Sacha Greif.
Of course there were other, less-prolific job boards like craigslist, freelance switch, and others, but the main idea was that I was using the same specific script to send out to many people.
It felt so much better than sitting on my laurels and just posting stuff on twitter or dribbble.
*** I stopped letting the success of my business depend on outside forces like others contacting me.
Because I did this, I was also able to track where my efforts were getting the biggest return.
I created an excel file, with an area for every source of lead I had. Every time I sent a new lead an email, I would update the file for that particular lead source.
Soon I was able to see which of these job boards were responding with the highest frequency (Folyo), and put all my effort into these sources.
I also prepared for the future. Whenever a lead would email me back even if just to let me know they were going with another designer, I would put them in a new folder – a pool of past leads to follow up with in the future.
*** This pool quickly became my most valued source for new work.
Starting and depending on my freelance business taught me that you can’t listen to what other people say will work for you.
If you do what everyone says you should do, you’ll be doing a little bit of everything.
As Ramit said in his course, “couldn’t hurt, could it? OF COURSE IT CAN HURT.”
To be a successful freelancer I needed to focus on one thing, getting more clients, not everything.
*** Constantly updating my portfolio website, tweeting, and posting dribbble shots, might have felt like I was working on my freelance business, but in the end it was just a distraction.
In the end, contacting people directly has has other benefits too, like allowing me to charge more.
I now know approximately how many leads I have to email in order to get a new client.
Do you know that number? How confident would you be if you did?
Reply in the comments, I’d love to discuss your freelance business. Before you ask why I post on this blog, it’s to network, share my experience, and help others – not make money.
Update: There’s been a backlash of comments from Designer News. I want to go ahead and point out that this is simply my experience, and I’m not saying portfolios are bad or you shouldn’t have one. I’m just saying I didn’t need one. Also, make sure you check out folyo, Earn1k if you’re a freelance designer.
Fear is an exceptional motivator.
If you are running an early stage startup and you are not in a constant state of terror, you are doing something wrong.
Fear is wasting a day working on clerical housekeeping or spending weeks chasing funding, and not improving your product or service.
Fear is having quit your $200,000 a year job to now earn zero.
Fear is seeing a competitor launch a genius new product or feature.
Fear is not knowing whether you can afford payroll 3 months from now.
Fear is a day going by with no customer signups.
Fear is having no Plan B for your life. This startup is your life.
Fear is your market hypothesis being wrong.
If you are running an early stage startup and you have no fear, you will fail. If you have no fear, it means you don't have enough on the line. Perhaps you've raised a lot of funding and think your worries are over. Perhaps you don't have any rent or bills to pay or a family who depends on you.
Perhaps you live in an echo-chamber of self-congratulation.
No fear results in zero business model "traction first" startups that only Silicon Valley can sustain and reward. This is not your goal.
No fear results in frivilous spending and high burn rates.
No fear results in lethargy, procrastination and a lack of drive.
No fear results in blindness. If you stumble upon a great opportunity - pivot.
Fuck over-analysis. The number one goal of an early stage startup is survival.
Is your company going to be around a year from now? How? Raising a round of funding? Wrong fucking answer if you're outside of the USA.
Early stage startups - please be more afraid.
A favorite topic of the times is "this economy". What is "this economy"? I'm so very ignorant when it comes to these big topics. I always tell my husband,…
A favorite topic of the times is "this economy". What is "this economy"? I'm so very ignorant when it comes to these big topics. I always tell my husband, "That's why God gave me you. To help me see the big stuff."
It's not always easy to understand why things are the way they are or why certain things happen. Sometimes frustration fogs up my mind when trying to sort out reasons and facts so all that big stuff gets pushed to the back until inspiration to deal with it hits.
What I do find easy, is to evaluate the things I do understand and try to improve in that department.
Sometimes I am asked, "How do you find time to do all that?" Make my own laundry soap, tend to a fairly large garden, raise three children, take care of my home, make my own bread....and so on. You know all the stuff you read about in this blog.
I view all the stuff I do around here as my "job". Just as cost cutting and time management was important when I worked a secular job, it is equally if not more important since I made the decision to not work.
When my second child was born, I simply quit work and informed Byron I wouldn't be going back. Somehow we would have to make it on his salary. I needed to be with my children. As much as others wished to help, no one would love them or care for them like me. I needed them and they needed and need me. I am an event florist and I still do events when and what dates I want to.
Byron being the man he is was actually happy that I made this decision. It wasn't easy, but working together we identified those things we could do without and we cut cost where ever we could. Contentment is so much more important than stuff that it cannot be compared. It's amazing, but we are better off and happier now than we have ever been. We eliminated debt, cut up ALL credit cards (we do not have even one), and only buy if we have saved for it. For a great plan on how to do this look up Dave Ramsey.
The first step to cutting home costs is identifying what really is a need. Most of our Neeeeds...are wants. Does everyone in the household neeeeed a cell phone? Do you neeeeed television? Do you neeeeed a manicure? Do you neeeeed a four wheeler? Do you neeeeed lots of "friends" and parties? I have an acquaintance (a real sweetheart) who has admitted to not having saved a cent, but has a huge house and note, she gets a manicure every week, her toes done, her skin sanded, she eats out all the time.....do you see a ticking time bomb? By the way she also takes anti-depressants. These very same type people loudly complain about "this economy". Which I know is bad and worsening.
I find that when someone grows up and figures out the difference between a want and a need they just naturally know where to look to shore up the family budget and cuts costs. They also naturally will find contentment and in contentment they will find God.
