Combining productisation and authenticity as a freelance designer

In this weeks email:

• Designing a landing page and thinking hard on productisation.

• Excitement.

• Emotional hard realities and dips in motivation.

• Authenticity and promoting my skills.

• Being excited again.

That’s been the last month of starting a solo/freelance-ish/business.

Deciding what to do with my (work) life, up to mid-April

Previous post: Taking a sabbatical and returning to work

I’d spent the previous months endlessly looping on a paradox of choice and questioning my values. It looked something like this:

Freelance work = work I enjoy 👍

Work I enjoy = always working and selling my time instead of a scaleable business or product.

Something different 🤔 

Starting a business = marketing, leads, scaling, product market-fit, risk and no income.

Less risk and a better quality of life = freelance 🤩 

Tech world and past work is easier to get clients 👍

Tech world = good for the world? 🤔 

Setting boundaries and learning I enjoy designing.

Freelance work = work I enjoy 👍

Start again and repeat.

This honestly was a little tiring.

I think it scared my girlfriend with the endless self questioning.

Founders Kite Club event, mid-April

I went away for a weekend with founders with the intention of socialising in a really great community. Some good wing-foiling with friends.

Fortunately* there was no wind. *It’s rare I’d say this.

We went super deep into a three day workshop on finding your bottleneck.

I chose my bottle-neck to be what to do with (work) life.

I got lots of tips, reassurances, suggestions and real life experience advice from other founders and people I highly respect.

At the end of the trip I felt energised to start doing design work I love.

Whilst building it out as something scaleable.

Getting sick, end of April

Excited to get to work, I a launched the first version of zebradesign.io and wrote some content about the journey.

It got an amazing response on Linkedin and Twitter and reached a lot of people.

I got sick for a week yet was desperate to work. It was exciting.

When I emerged I stopped. Something didn’t feel quite right.

A brilliant designer I had collaborated with through my previous design studio, Daniel, pointed out that the zebradesign.io pointed towards me over selling capabilities.

I was not highlighting the collaborative efforts on the case studies on the homepage.

He was totally right, and his strong feedback hit a course of correction.

But, first, I had a panic about my skills as a UI designer and feared I’d never make any money…

Cold outreach, beginning of May

Feeling stressed I started ‘outreach’. Finding job post of tech companies, mainly in web3, looking for product designers.

This was probably the most lonely and depressing work task I’ve done. I got demotivated and really stopped enjoying work.

Where there was flow before - strategising on possible business models or designing cool interfaces - I was now stuck.

Re-finding flow, mid-May

I was fortunate enough to meet some friends at the weekend and talk about feeling low on the work.

A brilliant friend and entrepreneur Peter pointed out it was normal.

What a relief just to be normal!

He pointed out that working for yourself you endlessly have to find the joy, excitement and the points that motivate you.

If you don’t find that first, there’s almost no point turning up to work.

Note: his advise was probably worse/better than this - there’s a lot of my own interpretation here but he sparked my motivation.

Motivation again!

I went away and re-thought about my goals.

I’ve also spent the last three months doing a morning journal exercise.

This has removed a lot of stress and has become an essential morning routine.

Revisiting the goals, I then added them to my morning journaling.

The result = even more stress removed.

Instead of starting work worrying about making money, I’ve taken the time quietly to reassure the worried parts of me.

To reiterate the strategy of generating awareness, building leads, doing enjoyable work and then designing and helping founders.

Re-sketching out what’s important from a less stress place, I can start working much more towards meaningful and impactful work.

Authenticity.

I set about a rework of my website.

Making it a lot more authentic to my skillset as a designer. Show case leading teams and projects, workshop facilitation and problem solving.

The authenticity shows my unique experience, making me stand out.

It also let me dive deeper into the design as a service model.

Something I believe offers the best value to startups.

No one-off high-cost projects.

No hiring designers when you need the designs for development yesterday.

No being left in the dark when you need to iterate on the designs and the agency has moved on and suggested a freelancer or using the design system to edit. Just design, done, fast.

I want to write a whole article on this, and I will do! Coming Soon!

Finding value to offer

Experience one:

A lot of this has been based on my experience with my last agency I co-founded. We had a super successful product in terms of revenue and bringing multi-skilled designers together to rapidly design.

However;
I am ashamed by how many designs didn’t get implemented.
Or, how many took months to a year to go live.
Or, how the founders, developers were left in the dark on handover.
Or, how much work had to be picked up by freelancers after the work to get projects live.

I believe it was a great product, but what an amazing opportunity to start over again rather than iterating on a model.

Experience two:

DesignJoy and the Design as a Service model.

If you’re a designer or founder you might* have heard of this guy - Brett from Design Joy.

*I hadn’t - I owe a huge thanks to my friend Henry (designing at Summer Finance) who introduced the concept and gave me brilliant career tips.

Known for making $120k monthly revenue (over $1million year) as a one man design agency with almost zero costs.

This model sticks out:

• Get started fast

• High quality designs

• A fixed monthly rate

Note: Design joy is focused on branding and websites only. I’m curious to how well it can work for product and more complex problems. I’m also skeptical on the business model and value per client this guy brings.

Iterating

I’m combing the two unique experiences to something I believe can really help with product and brand design.

Unlike most Design as a Service studios (btw, there’s now quite a lot!) that are focused on entirely async communication, I can bring workshop’s to solve complex problems with knowledge experts.

I can introduce rapid prototyping, user interface design and user testing from my experience at my previous studio.

Then provide the subscription service to continually help teams with all their design needs.

Why:

• It offers the same fast value from my previous agency.

• Removes the aspects of it I was not so happy about: The continued and highly focused support on a subscription means I can really help products get launched fast and never leave teams in the dark.

• It leverages what is a successful model, Design as a a Service (loads of copies is a good sign the model offers value to the world, not that there is competition).

Conclusion

There’s some things that have really stuck out in the last month:

• Community and reassurance is everything - don’t work alone even if you’re working alone.

• Strategy and taking time to release is important to make sure you’re authentic and motivated - don’t force quick releases like a startup, you’re not racing to market.

Thank you to all the help, advice and feedback to get this far. Onwards!