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!

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?

Things have been going well for me lately in the freelancing world. Too well—going against one of my cardinal rules for myself. A short while back I posted 5 rules for freelancers to follow in a tough economy, but looking back they apply to any career, or just in general. I live by these as of late.

1. Network Aggressively
2. Focus on Efficiency
3. Think Small
4. Leverage Your Past Work
5. Avoid Overworking

On Christmas Eve I had a client forced to cancel our deal because the brand he was promoting cut their campaign with him, and while I hoped he’d compensate me for my time, I understand why we left with just a partial payment. As a result I needed to make a lot of money fast, so I spent Christmas day thinking of how to revolutionize my working behaviors. And the result..?

Since December 26, I’ve been booked solid with work.

Clean workspace for a New Year

It was great at first; a constant flow of incoming work was foreign to me and every client was amazed, so I would absorb any gig that came my way into my schedule. It was smooth sailing for a week. Earning the $800 I needed, passing it even to $1,500 worth of work. The tally right now is $4,400 and growing since Jan 1st. Great, isn’t it?

Until one client slows it all down.

Nightmare client Moving on to Day 3 of what takes other clients 3 hours TOPS. Me and my dedication to service. — From Twitter

I over-booked myself. I can handle all the work fine—I’m ambitious, not stupid. The problem arises when the other person involved in the deal can’t maintain the focus on speed-of-delivery that you pride yourself on. I’ve been marketing myself as a designer you go to in an emergency, which is also fantastic for affiliate marketers who need landing pages for every conceivable idea they come up with. That’s my niche: Exceptional designs made for affiliates that show up in their in-box before they are even done thinking about what to eat for their next meal. Except, it’s not so rapid when a client takes 3 hours to respond for a project designed to take 1.

Now my focus is to complete what projects I do have, sit back on the extra cushion I’ve worked hard for, and maintain a more comfortable growth of capital. Instead of pushing $300+ a day, taking on one or two smaller gigs a day sounds much more appealing. A great thing about being in my position is that being offered shares of revenue for a more long-term project isn’t anything uncommon—it’s happened twice. When everyone says “wow, I wasn’t expecting anything this good, and at least not until 2 days from now,” finding work isn’t an issue. The issue is knowing what work you want to be doing and politely declining the rest, or finding it another suitor.

Which of my 5 Rules do you think is most important? What projects is everyone involved with?

Photo by

I don’t know why people in the business realm are scared of a down-swinging economy. It gives you a great chance to seize opportunities when people who should be scared of their poor and volatile investments are cowering and watching the sky as it falls. This is a great time to make safe and smart, not necessarily un-risky, decision.

Rupert Murdoch puts it well when talking about his own investments:

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”

Gary Vaynerchuk, photo by

Gary Vaynerchuk also does a great job explaining this to his readers and subscribers. Big companies are scared right now because they are uncertain of what sort of returns their monetary investments will make. People like us—Gary, you, and myself—don’t need to worry as much, if at all, about financial investments in our efforts to become successful. What matters most and is consistently valuable is your time and effort. Gary would say it only matters that you bust it, day in and day out.

Today I saw his talk at the New Media Expo earlier this year that I found from his Twitter page (@garyvee; follow him if you know what’s good for you, and especially if you don’t). It’s a great summary of the core values Gary has toward success, and the great thing is that they all revolve around passion and effort and devotion to your idea. No VC’s, no miracle strokes of luck, and no sympathy for slacking.

Do you agree? Should people invest their time and passion to compensate for the risk of investing money currently?

The current state of Muxtape

I was browsing News.YCombinator as per usual and came across an interesting concept and site named Muxtape. As I said via Twitter, I like simple. Muxtape is simple.

From what I can tell, it’s going to be a new take on the prowess of having a band profile on Myspace, but made as simple as Virb—hopefully even more simple than Virb is. I’ve come to appreciate the more simplistic designs and companies as of late, and it’s becoming less and less surprising to see they are often the more successful, both financially and in staying true to their initial motivations.

Muxtape was created under the idea of sharing mixtapes with people online, in a rough and more “real” way than something than “having a profile with a playlist;” where the playlist is the profile. As it gained instant popularity, the music labels and their little lapdog, otherwise known as the RIAA, came knocking asking for settlements and business deals—otherwise complicating the dead-simple model of the site and sucking Justin and his site into the black hole of big business.

It’s impressive to me how Justin decided to abandon the labels, effectively dumping a large portion of the music available to place on his ‘muxtapes,’ staying true to his original goal. He says about this:

The [deals] had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They’d already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. I didn’t get into this to build a big company as fast as I could no matter what the cost, I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people who love music, and I plan to continue doing that.

This reminded me of an image I saw on Flickr earlier which is a great example of staying true to one’s self, showing the policy of financial guru Dave Ramsey, where he refuses to accept credit card payment for his products because it goes against his personal finance philosophies. From a business standpoint, many see denying a large portion of potential customers as suicide. Such conviction, sticking to your ideals, is something I respect a lot, and I suspect is a good platform to build a solid business on.

Do you think keeping it simple is the best route in developing a new business? Would you go as far as not accepting credit cards to prove yourself to your customer base?

Muxtape on Twitter: @muxtape

It’s unavoidable—when the economy starts going down, it becomes suspiciously hard to find freelance work. Maybe you use freelancing to pay the bills while you go to university and are working on your startups—such as I—or maybe you have a few kids and you’d like to make their Christmas extra special this year.

The bottom line is we’re all hurting in one way or another, but whining about it won’t do any good. Here are some things I do to leverage a bad economy:

1. Network Aggressively

In one of Seth’s latest blog posts he talks about his friend Tara who took a bad economy and used it to propel herself into a premier position as a job hunter as it started turning back around into a growth cycle.

The best time to start a gig like this is right now, when no one in particular wants to connect with and help out the superstars. Later, when the economy bounces back, your position is extremely valuable.

I’ve recently joined a local group SEO group at Meetup.com which proved to be a valuable experience just after going to one meetup. I made a client who is showing promise in the long-run with his new startup as well as two other great people who are great at what they do and can surely lead to meeting others within the field. It doesn’t matter if SEO is exactly what you do; it’s not for me. The key is to meet people within the same general area of interest. I actually think it’s better to avoid meeting only people from your specific niche. This helps you branch out and become more versatile—something any freelancer needs.

2. Focus on Efficiency

One thing I love about this little niche I’ve carved for myself as a designer is how clients love how fast I provide for them. I follow a little principle that always seems to impress my clients.

The sooner I get in and out of this project, the sooner you get in and out of it as well.

This might not click with your methodology, but I like to be done with clients before the day’s end. This gives two great advantages:

1. Your time becomes more valuable. I charge a minimum of $50 per hour for my work because the entire project is usually done in less than 10 hours, ultimately costing either the same or less than other designers, but the speed of delivery allows the client to implement faster, which is where the real value lies.
2. The client gets out of your hair sooner. Sure, I have a few clients I love to death, but any client turns bad if you give them too much wiggle room in the process, and clients get buggy the longer a project takes. Being straightforward means your life is less full of hassle, which I think we can all agree is great.

This core competency has become a great marketing point to many of my clients and makes it really easy for them to recommend me to their business associates. No matter what you do, being efficient at it makes life easier. A great benefit of this approach is that it weeds out clients you want to avoid naturally. Flaky clients will not be committed to paying the 50% down payment within the first 30 minutes of talking to you, but super-focused and super-dedicated clients will every time.

3.Think Small

Find small markets to enter

I wont’ give out where I go to find a large bulk of my work, but the great thing about the web is that almost everything is monetize-able. This means for every niche or every style of marketing that exists, there are communities of people who focus on profiting from them. When it’s tough finding larger clients, don’t underestimate the value of clients who need multiple landing pages for their split-tested campaign or who are looking for a large quantity of simple designs.

For the quickest, simplest projects, look for affiliate marketers, Myspace app developers, SEO firms who want to outsource simple design work, the list goes on and on. The main idea here is that you don’t have to rely on one or two projects for this month’s rent. Find a niche where you can find three or four clients a day who need $30-40 worth of landing pages or ads designed, or some small bit of code tweaked in their back end.

4. Leverage Past Work For Profits

If you’ve made a brush, vector, stock photo, or even bits of useful code for anything in the past, you are probably missing out on some of the easiest income ever. There are many people who make livings off of selling stock art to sites like iStockPhoto. Businesses leverage their past works all the time be repackaging a product and selling it under a different idea or to a different market that hadn’t been tested before—what’s stopping you from doing the same?

There are tons of blog entries and news articles about people making well over six-figures, or selling over 500,000 pieces of stock art.

Here is an incomplete list of sites you can sell your stock work on:

• iStockPhoto - Stock photos and vectors
• Shutterstock.com - Stock photos
• Flash Den - Stock work for Flash
• Turbo Squid - Stock 3D models and vectors
• Audio Jungle - Stock mp3’s
• Them Forest - Stock themes

More education on selling stock art as supplemental income:

• Freelance Switch - Search for “stock + art”

5. Avoid Overworking

Truth be told, bad times don’t necessarily need to call for desparate measures. A lot of people carry the mindset that working more means they’ll be more successful.

This is never the case.

Read Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Workweek as well as his blog to learn about the art of working harder, by working less. Reducing stress from your life makes everything more enjoyable, no matter whether the economy is good or bad. For some, it’s even beneficial to approach life as a fght against stress.

As designers and developers, we are naturally inclined to want to work more, work harder, work faster. It’s great to have this drive, but it’s unhealthy. Learn that hours spent designing and developing are not scalable, but the end product is, and focus on creating scalable, usable, necessary products.

Reduce your expenses as best you can and and stay out of debt. Will fall into place if you stay focused and conscious of your goals.

Ten Lessons Startups Can Learn From Superheroes - Get more Business Plans

10 Reasons This is the Best Time to Build a Startup

The great people at NewsCred posted in their blog today a great list explaining, in 10 reasons, why this is the best time to build a start up. I won’t steal their content, so I recommend you go check out the entire list. Instead, I want to discuss three of the points they make—numbers 5, 2, and 1.

• #5 - Have a product - A community is not a product. Your users and friends—the site’s family—must gather for a purpose of some sort. Be it better communication, a product that saves them time, or even to share their appreciation for tee shirts. Have something, service or product, to give people.
• #2 - Have a business model - If you don’t have a business model, your project is a hobby, not a business. It’s amazing how many hobbyists have secured venture capitalism, oft in the millions. And some venture capitalists are wondering how they can stay afloat—I don’t know… maybe invest in people who aren’t a surefire loss? Make it premium, freemium, cost per click, cost per action (affiliate link), cost per user, cost per use, whatever. If you can’t charge people for your product, you should look into doing something else. End of story.
• #1 - Be fearless -As they say in the NewsCred post: “You’re an entrepreneur. You’re whole purpose of being is so that you can take scarce resources, optimize like hell and get maximum output from the least input. This is your time to shine.” Too many “entrepreneurs” are afraid to offend anyone or afraid to leave their safety zone, and they eventually get nudged off the cliff by competitors. Stand your ground and be aggressive. You’re taking huge risk by being an entrepreneur, don’t flounder that risk by playing it safe. The opportunity is there for those who want to take it.

One person I think does a great job of preaching this is Gary Vaynerchuk. He goes into good detail in explaining how he would go about building a business relevant to his area of expertise in a recent blog post, and his keynote speech for the Web 2.0 Expo is phenomenal. Read his blog and let his words sink in, but more importantly, get out there and get your business started.

Do you agree with these three main points I covered? What are you doing now to get your business off the ground in these “hard” time?

PS: If you like Gary’s blog, check out his company, Wine Library and his cast, Wine Library TV.