Episode Transcript:
Hey design starters, today, I would like to talk about, um, whether you can launch your design startup first, your productized design, without figuring out the processes first. So I know eventually you like to remove yourself. You know, in most things in your business, so you don’t have to fight fire every day.
And I’ve been there. I’ve been fighting fire like on a daily basis every time for many years, for like 10 years, at least. So it was only probably about five, six years ago when, you know, Things like that to change. Right. Um, thanks for the model of things to productizing my, um, different services that were used to be very customized to every different clients.
So in the beginning, when you, when you start and when you first launch your productized service or changing your business model, it will take some work. So one mistake. I see too many designers and service providers make is waiting for the perfect processes before launching. And this day will never come.
My friend, what I mean is yes, you processes are important. You need them to run the business and you need them to scale of the issue. Is that right? You don’t wait. You don’t, you don’t overthink on launching. Launching is different. Launching is starting out with real people, right? So even if you don’t know if your clients will take it well, we’ll take your idea.
Well, even if you don’t know if your processes, you’re going to tell them, you can honestly let them know that these are the things, these are the packages. These are what we give you. And if they find that it work from what you’ve said, you should just start first. Then you tweak your processes along the way while it’s going on.
Right. You may not be clear on the processes now on how to scale. Exactly. So you shouldn’t spend months figuring out the processes first without studying, because if you don’t know, and you’re not clear now, Um, right. Even in month’s time, you will probably not be clear as, as well because, um, clients, the, they, they can want anything and everything.
If you ask them what they want. So you need to start and stop and step up with the first thing first and let them know what you have to offer. You, give them and deliver. Right. And then the processes behind the scenes is for you to figure out for you to tweak for you, to perfect for you to change based on what you can help make it work.
So for my team, we’ve been making big, small changes to many things, um, like client onboarding, team training, designer, trainings, et cetera, over the past five years. Imagine that I did not start. Right. That would be a waste of five good years. So if you are still at pre-launch stage, not sure how things will work out, just launch and work with your first customer to test your processes out, to test your assumptions of your processes.
So they are really your customer, for example, right? I mean, you already. You have already sold to them. You’ve really pitched to them. They’re already your customer. So, you know, they don’t have to know your exact processes at that point anymore. Right? So you may be hiring designers. You may be using AI.
Artificial intelligence will be using machines. You may be using robots and maybe using templates, whatever the case to the customer so long, you are delivering the output on time. And with the quality you have promise that is good enough. So, for example, if you say that your deliverables will not be templates.
Yeah. You don’t use templates, but you need to find out a certain way on how you work to provide what you have. Promise. For example, if you say you, your artwork is going to be really fast, really quick, turn around you, you give them tomorrow, for example, then you really have to give tomorrow. So. You already have promised them that, then you figure out, okay, how am I going to do this to give tomorrow?
So you get us sense that reasonable promise you give them the reasonable promise, and then you work backwards to what’s what you can do. So for the first customer, you may be going crazy and working really hard, overnight, really fast, maybe two designers at a time. It can be anything right. Just to give that promise.
So if you tweak and say and do many things and say, maybe I can use AI, maybe I can get more hands on the job and then deliver to the customer. But you realize there’s no way that you can do this with many customers and you can’t find that way. Then you just stop at that customer. Right. And you don’t move on to another one.
And that works really because you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna scale with this kind of process. Then you go onto the next promise or you change your process and figure out how you can give, still give that promise with some other process. So you don’t have to worry whether it works or not before starting because you may never know what, what you are going to offer the customer at the end of the day.
So you need to, you need to first start off with someone to really know, like put it in reality rather than just on paper, on people is good. You you’ve done all your kind of ideation. Um, your thoughts, your mind mapping. It can be anything, then you need to put it out and really serve someone first. So while you deliver for that customer, try to notice right along the way, try to notice which step has you inside as a bottleneck eventually.
Yes, you want to be free. So why not free something? Something must be some, something must be keeping you there where you can remove yourself and still let the business run. Right? So you need to break up everything and figure out which one is the bottleneck, which area. If let’s say you are not in it. Can you delegate that to someone else?
Which area can you automate automize? Um, or find some app or some software to replace you in some way? It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It can be a small thing. It can be give me things like customer onboarding. Doesn’t it. You. Can he be somebody else? It can be things like following brand guidelines to create a design.
Does it have to be you? Can it be another designer? Can it be a, an in-house designer, another you have trained. So you’ve got to think in this way first, and if it can be removed to streamline and Quicken your delivery. Then that can be a new process. Right? You can just add that in. So would you say that you can have all this figured out before starting?
It’s also pretty hard, so it’s actually harder to figure all this out before starting. Right. So point of today’s message is, you can adjust along the way. So you can, and you should start first, even without processes fully figured out, because you will never know if they work till you try them out with real people get started now with your first client, I will say.
Right. So yeah, that’s all for today. I’m heading out. See you the next episode. Bye.