Sunday Letters- June 8

Weekly updates on design work and behind the scenes of building my design studio

Welcome to Sunday Letters, where I share updates on my design studio and work. This update is long overdue. If you are new to these letters, I write them as if I am sending these to a friend about behind the scenes of building this business.

This Edition is called Ray of Light. The names always have some sort of philosophical reference and they are up for your own interpretation.

In the last real update I posted, I was looking to create a global lead flow instead of local leads and I needed to focus more on creating videos consistently, and in order to do that I had to reduce my workload of local or unaligned work coming my way, which I did.

The risk paid off. Even though I am still very inconsistent with my videos, a few of them hit the spot in the algorithm's belly, reached close to a million people in the last month, brought appreciation for the work, 10k people to the community, and many leads.

Now another benefit of this was, in a very long time I was challenged to expand my skill set, which is the best outcome out of all this. I have been a designer for more than 4 years now in various capacities and the majority of the work came from referrals or from people I already knew. These prospects are warmest; they have seen your work, they know you second hand, and they don't need a lot of convincing, but this is not the case with social inbound.

I can create great work, I know a thing or 2 about design, but I am not a salesman. I found myself to be very sloppy in closing projects even when I knew I would really provide great value to this person and his company, but I somehow don't know how to communicate that to the prospect, which is now setting me on a path of learning how to actually close sales along with other things like building and growing a team of in-house members.

Again, like with content, I have no idea how to do it, but guess we'll figure it out. Secondly, I will also need to do a better job of striking a balance between creating these videos and working on my work. I should not be doing a lot of one thing and nothing of the other. Another thing to focus on in the next month is to put out volume. We have the initial social traction and now it is a matter of numbers, which is why I have taken out my focus from other platforms and creating separately for LinkedIn and X.

I am not an influencer. I have actual work to do as well.

This personal brand concept was cringe at first but it seems to have its benefits and now I do enjoy the art of creation as well.

This is also the reason my next choice of platform would be YouTube because any platform needs your 100 percent focus to be cracked and luckily I don't half-ass things anymore, which is why if I can create really valuable long-form content it will automatically translate into more traction on business platforms like X and LinkedIn, but it will not be the other way around. It is only possible to crack one channel at a time because you need to consistently sit inside the analytics, improve, and put out enough quantity to have the slightest idea of what works. But this would only be picked up when I have enough people on Instagram because I do not want to take the pedal off the gas.

Lastly, one solution to this is team building. If I have people who know about my business as much as I do, I can focus on figuring out other things. My vision and bet for the long term is that visual storytelling is going to be very valuable and I want to build the most talent dense creative company.

Why this?

This is happening at the forefront of everything,

As building software products is becoming easier- A great product intro video with beautiful motion can help you raise enough money to last 2 generations. Take Cluely for example.

Top of the funnel for any business will be organic content and if you know how to crack it- you are valuable. The person needed for this is someone who is not only an editor or design but a visual storyteller. Someone who knows not only scripting but also the business side of the video.

Early stage startups are more and more hiring for these 3 roles. Founding Engineer, Founding Designer and Founding Content person. The whole of marketing department in now content and videos is the biggest pillar of it.

We humans have the tendency to think whatever worked in the past will keep on working but the reality is the most amount of gains are made when you bet on things that do not yet exist but will exist. The millions of previous century were made with Oil and Land, millions of the last decades were made with Software, millions of the next decades will be made with….

If you are a creative person with a work ethic of an accountant- this is your time.

Thanks for reading, see you next Sunday

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