The Idea

Earlier, I discussed how I am unhappy with my current path doing freelance design. The work is enjoyable, but the reward doesn’t scale, so I came up with some goals for this summer. However, I’ve found that often times simply stating your goals gives you a psychological boost that satisfies your desire to move forward; enough so to make you lose that motivation.

So now, I am going to only post about which of my goals are being accomplished and the things done to get to that point, starting with Angel Strata.

I’ve been involved with Anticlothes and found I really enjoy designing the clothing and helping build the brand’s image, but I also feel like my education and my creativity aren’t being used in a manner that can benefit society. I know my skills in design and business can apply towards helping people directly, which is what Angel Strata is all about.

Every piece of clothing sold translates directly to books being bought for libraries in developing nations, trees planted in reserves where they will be untouched and allowed to grow and provide us with clean air, and contributing towards emergency relief.

You look good, while someone else without the means gets help with something they need. Win/Win. Originally, I intended to provide a 1-to-1 contribution with each shirt sold; you buy a shirt, I give one to a child who needs one. Instead, I think we could better help people by taking consumers’ cash and turning it into more long-term investments: Education, nature re-population, sustainability, emergency relief, etc. etc.

Origins of Angel Strata

In the spring of 2008, I was in a MIS class with a major focus on the business application of statistics. For our final project, we were assigned teams, and each team was to create a business who worked with the Dell Childrens Hospital. We were to present our shell of a business at the bi-annual Cleveland Business Fair at the end of the semester.

Kure Clothing was our concept, created with the children’s psychological well-being in mind. The company would send agents to the hospital to spend creative time with the children, letting them draw and paint pictures to support them through what is called “creative healing.”

Some of the designs would be chosen to be used on the apparel, and all the profits of Kure would go toward relieving the families of the financial strain of having a sick child. It’s hard enough as it is dealing with a child who, in most cases, is temirnally ill.

We came up with four shirts—most notably is the Moo shirt—and ended up as one of the winners of the business fair. After the semester was over, my group handed me rights to all the shirts and the concept. Later, in my communications class I gave a speech discussing the project and took orders for shirts afterward.

86% of the class wanted to order a shirt, and 24% of those wanted to order all 4. I have a good product on my hands.

The Transition

I’ve spent a lot of my time reading articles posted on Paul Graham’s Hacker News and one thing I always find myself reading carefully and feeling most connected to are articles discussing social entrepreneuriship and problems we are facing as a world, rather than economic problems solely in the United State or United Kingdom, or hacks and tricks for programming.

Many hours of introspection later, I’ve come to find the most enjoyment out of knowing my efforts can provide a better life for someone else, while still fulfilling my desires to grow a business and be creative. As much help as the children in the Dell Childrens Hospital could use, I think giving unfortunate children a chance at education and helping the earth rebuild itself form the roots up are more desperate causes. Many of our problems could be solved if everyone had a fair shot at an education and a healthy atmosphere, and Angel Strata’s mission is to contribute to that.

My call to you…

If you, or anyone you know, is affiliated with great foundations who can make these donations and contributions a reality, please come my way or send them to me (or me to them). I’m always looking to work with great people.

If you work in retail and would like to sell Angel Strata clothing in your store, contact me and we can discuss arrangements. Or if you would like to donate your services or to invest, feel free to contact me!

Today, Philip made a presentation on usability at BT, where he works. I read through it a few times and I wanted to share the contents of slide 9 with everyone:

What is Usability?

Usability has five core components:

1. Learning: How easy is it for people to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter a system?
   
2. Efficiency: Once people have learnt the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
3. Memory: When people return to the system after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
4. Errors: How many errors do people make, how sever are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
5. Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the system?

If you can take these 5 core components and quantify them—such as counting how many click a user takes to accomplish Task X—then your site or business will be able to take measurable steps towards being more enjoyable for your customers, which hopefully translates to more profit.

Be creative; try and come up with obscure metrics to measure. It’s difficult to tell causation in a lot of usability tests, but easy to measure correlation. Make sure you only change one detail at a time to ensure 100% accurate results.

Do you implement usability-testing? Does it work well for you? If not, how will you implement it?

Today, I went to put my laptop on a desk when I got a text message. I was startled by my ringtone and dropped my laptop on the ground. It now has dent marks on the bottom. The text message was from an annoying friend simply saying “I’m eating a hot dog. FML

It seems that as technology makes communication easier, it is easy to be so obsessed with it that something as simple as receiving a text message is instantly more important than everything going on around us, such as this except.

Take some time to enjoy real life, and maybe set aside some times of the day, or days of the week, where you disconnect yourself from the grid. You may be pleasantly surprised.

So here’s a question for everyone…

What is your definition of being successful?

For some I’m sure it means a having a lot of money, for some having a healthy family. For me, being successful would simply mean I can live where I want and work only when I feel truly inspired and passionate. To be able to relax and have fun when I feel it would create more happiness than ‘working’.

What about you?

I’ve seen a lot of people lately working on a “startup,” but one problem I see is everyone (generally speaking) tries to stop and analyze every detail to be fully prepared for what may potentially lie ahead, especially at Hacker News. That’s their problem though.

Whether it’s growing a business, building a relationship, or trying to decide where to go for dinner tonight, just stop and take a second to realize how much you’re slowing yourself down by trying to think everything through—just do it.

Take whatever action you feel needs to be done to grow your business. Do whatever you feel you should do to make your relationship work the best you can. Just pick a place for dinner. Be spontaneous and daring. Be ready to learn what works and what doesn’t, or what tastes good and what tastes bad; even if it means you are put through some troubling times or learn a weakness or two about yourself.

Embrace new and uncomfortable experiences, and look forward to change. Just do what feels right.

I recently had the pleasure to talk with Dustin Curtis and read a recent—rather blunt—rant on American Airlines’ website usability. In his response to AA’s letter in reply, he states:

I didn’t realize this was happening (referring to understanding his thirst to become better) until I saw a video of Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, explaining the phenomenon as it relates to writing and production. He points out how that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think you can abstract taste one level further from the people of a company and apply it to the culture of the company.

I think his viewpoint is a tad pretentious, and what we’re seeing here is really a company who is afraid to put itself in a new position, be it out of fear or some sort of analytical paralysis that says if it’s new, it might not work. I think good ‘taste’ comes from a willingness to change—rather, an insistence on change for the better leads to what comes across as tasteful.

…which leads me to my point:

What is the right thing to do is usually difficult to commit to because it doesn’t feel comfortable. It tests your willpower and how much you can trust your own judgment. Knowing the details is important, but taking action is more important. Yes, I’m writing this partly because I’ve found myself second-guessing my intentions based on theoretical outcomes, but I think it’s a little bit of wisdom many people don’t take heed of. Take charge; be bold; just do it.

Do you think people freeze up when it’s time to act? Have you had an experience where you should have taken action but didn’t?

Join the discussion on Hacker News.

I make good money. But it doesn’t scale.

As a result, I have two goals this summer:

• Make $100,000
• Learn French

Learning french is for my own enjoyment, because I love to learn and I’ve always wanted to be fluent in it—I don’t know why, just have. More relevant to my blog is the $100,000 goal.

Why such a high goal?

$100,000 in 3 months is a pretty lofty accomplishment to make, but it’s not even about the money. I’ve noticed that the more freelancing work I do, the more clients are sent and attracted my way, almost all of them via word of mouth. With a growing reputation as a freelance designer, my identity is being cornered into that image. My personal brand is having the ‘Entrepreneur’ part stripped from it, leaving me as just a designer. This isn’t what I want for myself, or those around me.

So this is where the goal comes in. In order to accomplish such a high mark in just a few months, I would have to do freelance work for 15+ hours a day to grow my income linearly to reach that point. Doable? Sure, but definitely not my ideal of a rewarding effort. Instead, this goal will force me to create my own product or purchasable/subscribe-able service that can provide income per purchase rather than per amount of time spent in Photoshop.

Linear vs. Scalable Income Models

Currently, my freelancing rates increase about 15% per month, but each new project has higher demands and the clients tend to request more and more revisions per ‘price level’ which slows my production rate substantially. It’s tolerable as it is now, but with a little insight, I can definitely see myself getting trapped in this game.

So I’ve discussed in this post what I need to do—go from a per project/per hour basis to a scalable, product-based income—and in the next few posts I’ll be going into more detail about how I am going to achieve this and discuss the finer details of design, production, and marketing.

Do you think I’m making the right choice? Why or why not?

I’ve decided to redesign my site. it will no longer just be a blog, but my central hub of business:

• Blog
• Portfolio
• Press info
• My companies’ info

I need a more personal outlet for my passions, and I feel this blog doesn’t do it as is. It’s not ‘me’ and I feel like I’m not motivated to update as a result.

There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one.  You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.

You just get successful.

— Steve Blank

Some spammers have taken a heavy toll on the comments section of my WordPress admin panel.

In efforts to combat this, I’ve disabled comments temporarily. However, with this I plan to create more response-oritneted content—meaning, each blog post for a little while will be more open-ended, or even argumentative or persuasive. This should encourage people to reply through their own blog posts rather than just comments, providing tackbacks at the bottom of the post ratehr than linkbacks from the comments.

Considering my horrendously low subscriber count, these measures will probably give zero results, but you never know!

Would you be willing to contribute to discussion points? What about an ongoing blog-to-blog discussion?

I feel like people are afraid to ask for what they want. Be it some social crutch we use to avoid feeling uncomfortable or because we don’t realize the power behind informing someone you are looking for more than just the norm, the bottom line is we don’t ask for enough.

Freelancers are the biggest victims here.

From what I gather, most just quote a project, do it, and get on with their lives. What ever happened to wanting more? Being thirsty enough to put forth the desire and the effort to tell the client I give a damn is important to me, and here are three reasons why:

1. It sets the tone. When I quote a client for a landing page—I’ll usually say something identical to “$175 at my current rate, plus any bonuses”—I let them know I would like more than I am asking for. It tells them I am ambitious, that my chief concern is generating as high an ROI as possible, and that I’m either good enough or have enough guts to go out on the limb and challenge myself for the sake of providing a great result. To the client, this translates to “I am committed to this project and will make you more money quicker.”
2. It gives me control. When a client knows you are willing to mention earning more than you said a project would cost, it gives them a sense of reinforcement. It lets them realize they chose the right guy for the job. Most clients who ask questions about my mentioning of the bonus are comforted by it because it shows I know what I am doing. It says that rather than being in a  hectic rush to complete all my work, I will scrap a layout I think is awful because I know I can do better, and I will deliver it quickly (but not in a hurry).
3. It makes me happy. I have a huge sense of pride in knowing that a client is going to profit greatly from my work; it’s even provided a few opportunities at join ventures. So if you could increase your revenue by 15% (about how much more I make from bonuses) simply by telling a client ‘I want to do so well you think my time is worth more than you are actually paying‘, why not? As a student responsible for all my bills, this makes life just that much easier.

This idea doesn’t apply to just designers or freelancers. It doesn’t even just apply to business transactions, or any transactions. It can be applied everywhere. It’s powerful because it means you are in tune with yourself and know where you stand and are willing to strive for improvements. I think it’s helped me be an unusually positive person who takes pride in the things I do and the people I associate with.

Do you think my thoughts are accurate? Am I way out of line?