My first thought when I got out of design school was to launch a design studio. A few nightmare clients within the first couple of years of freelance design and I realized that I don’t think I could do this on my own—I was ill-equipped, had no idea how to communicate with clients and I felt that my skills weren’t in a place that I could be confident in, so I took a chance on tech and worked my way up from intern visual designer at a tech agency to leading design projects at a fast-growing SaaS product company.
Fast forward almost 10 years since I made that decision, collecting memories and fostering new skills I didn’t realize were important for being an individual contributor, but also being reassured that there are just some things that I can do — I felt like the most valuable thing I built being in spaces with extremely talented and smart people was that I was one of them too. I felt like I came out of those experiences more and more confident so here I am: I’m trying to build a creative business.
WTF is a creative business? My own studio? Freelancing?
Thanks, Kat for turning me towards passive income. It’s not just the idea of selling products (thanks to my time at Shopify, I’ve validated this as a passive income stream, but I’m not happy about selling stickers). So having looked at art licensing through Stacie Bloomfield’s guide made me curious about the possibilities.
A parallel stream of thought about how to price my work led me to Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns, which I’ve been reluctant to buy because $. Instead I found a stream of him talking about some of his findings through Chris Do’s The Futur podcast/video. I never got around to finishing it (yet), but Pricing Creativity- The Futur Podcast.
Somehow having rabbit holed into the creative business entrepreneurship neck of the woods, I continued to listen to more of The Futur. It’s the one business podcast I trust to listen to because it intersects design/art/creativity with business and entrepreneurship. Chris Do does a great job of asking questions and keeping the conversation relevant to the topic. Anyway, to bring it full circle, they have a few conversations about passive income, one particularly with Dustin Lee, the founder of RetroSupply Co, who made a bunch of brushes and templates and made way too much money off it.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xbNeIQ5I9HpBJwULmPA1l?si=bbb2a826f6eb4f79
As in, this is a thing people do. Just casually. What.
Shanik also has lit a fire re: Notion templates, Super.so, Shopify templates, Webflow templates. The possibilities are endless.
That all said, there’s so much to explore—and in true creative mindset, I am a barrage of overwhelmed, excited, hopeful, afraid. In these moments I find that I end up paralyzed in idleness: so many paths to walk down, virtually unlimited timelines.
I want to:
- Set up passive income streams by October
- Evaluate if any are viable and sustainable income streams
- Re-evaluate if this life is for me. If yes, then
- Start client outreach October-November
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Else, try to find a new job 🥲
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I need to prioritize 2 or 3 possible income streams by the end of October so that I can weigh out my options and see which ones I can ride sustainably.
Aug 13
I just can’t see myself working on anything else. It feels good to be motivated by learning something new and inspired by the possibilities of creating something I want for myself. I want this to work. I just need to do the thing.
I’m doing this thing where I’m constantly interested in learning but haven’t really been comfortable applying anything. I’m afraid I’ll end up burning myself out learning all the things and then just end up doing nothing because of my crippling analysis paralysis.
I’m trying.
When’s it a good time to start a business?
My circumstances have made it possible for me to take a chance at starting my creative practice in this looming recession. I’m lucky to have spent the last 5 years defining my values, finding and focusing on my pace, filtering people and reshaping my priorities to support my own definition of work life balance. I spent my 20s partying hard, loving hard, and saving hard. I grew up in a family that doesn’t know how to talk about or save money. I saved enough money to pay for the time to recover my mental health and develop a pace to run my business in a way that makes me not hate that I’m stuck trying to survive late-stage capitalism.
I no longer have the mental capacity to spread myself thin and call this a side hustle. I care deeply about my autonomy and decided that now is always the best time to start a business. There’s no way I could have done this years ago, if I also care deeply about financial stability.
I’m also insanely lucky to have a supportive partner who knew what they were getting into and is willing to step in where I need it.
I’m excited to be where I am right now. And every day I tell myself that it’s ok if it doesn’t work out. There are always options. There are always a million ways to go my pace.