About the podcast
In this podcast and newsletter, we delve deeper into learning from Elizabeth's journey as a designer, founder, and builder of two successful startups. Elizabeth founded DesignerUp, a design education company, and Siimple, a simple web builder that allows anyone to create a website without coding or a tech background. Elizabeth is also a content creator and has grown her YouTube audience to 63,000 subscribers.
Watch full episode here
Watch on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcast
Note: Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcast coming soon
We spoke about
Elizabeth's journey of building her startup.
The inspiration behind starting DesignerUp.
About Siimple and the journey of building it.
Transitioning from being a designer to a founder and the required mindset shift.
The reality of being a founder that isn't shown on the internet.
Handling B2B business versus B2C business.
The future of design education and what's missing today.
Challenges designers face when it comes to understanding business.
How to deal with ambiguity and maintain mental health.
Balancing content creation and product building.
Challenges of a solo bootstrap founder.
How designers navigate the current challenging market.
How to build a better case study and get hired.
How to build systems and the approach we need to take.
The unique strengths designers have when they turn into founders.
Key Takeaways
It’s okay if you don’t know it all. Just grab the opportunity and then go figure it out.
The gap between design education and industry expectations is a growing pain, which led to the founding of DesignerUp.
Elizabeth identified the pain point of many small businesses struggling to build simple websites, which led to starting Siimple.
As a founder, you need to think about the end-to-end experiences, from how users use the product to how developers build it.
The KPI you start with as a bootstrap startup is different than the KPI you target when you raise funding from an investor.
Designers need to understand how businesses start from the top down.
It’s important for designers to keep their inner talk in check for their mental well-being.
Share your process and what you see.
Focus on the application, action, and put yourself out there when you are looking for your next design job. It’s not always about showing the happy path in your case study, have a story, talk about the failures and how you overcame them, and think beyond design.
Show a video walkthrough of your case study, it shows your personality, communication, and your storytelling skill.
When it comes to building systems, do it manually and see what works, document and then automate it.
We are heading towards becoming systemic problem solvers.
Resources
From the guest
Connect with Elizabeth on Linkedln : https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethalli/
DesignerUp: learning resources : https://designerup.co/
Simple website builder : https://getsiimple.com/
DesignerUp youtube channels: https://www.youtube.com/@DesignerUp
From John Rodrigues
John’s Linkedln : https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-rodrigues4/
My portfolio : https://john-rodrigues.com/
Landing design job with confidence book : https://john-rodrigues.com/book/
Thank you
Stay tuned for the next week newsletter meanwhile share and subscribe.
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