A year in Review.

It’s been almost exactly one year since my last update on this here Capsule Blog. A longish time. In that span of spacetime the whole world seems to have changed. My plans have changed with it.

In the current news of the day, the President of the United States dropped bombs on Iran, without congressional authority. Protests in Los Angeles have erupted to combat masked ICE agents abducting people en masse. There’s a new Nintendo. Ukraine launched a secret drone attack using “prefabricated homes” as containers for hordes of bomber drones that blew up a third of Russia’s bomber fleets. It’s just a very different world. You can read about that stuff over on my personal site: kow.fm.

It’s time to give an accounting of how I’ve done with Capsule, my little studio over the last year. Terrible. If a 50% success rate was good, then I’m killin’ it. Over the last year I’ve designed and developed my brains out. Grown as a person. Made new friends, new enemies, and turned some friends into enemies, and some enemies into worser enemies. So net negative. overall.

I’ll go into detail, the best I can, about what went right and wrong. But in brief: Charge enough, for the right thing, and don’t do too much.

What went well?

Lot’s of new friends and projects. Creatively, It’s been the most successfully year of my life. I really grew as a designer and a front end developer. I pushed harder and farther than I ever had. I improved, made some mistakes, and got better.

My work ethic really changed during this time. Before I had an unnatural fear of showing work that wasn’t 100% done or perfect. I got over that fear. I improved and developed a habit of making frequent smaller changes. Particularly if I have two projects running at once. Running a number of smaller projects concurrently began as a lot of fun. If it was more sustainable, or practical, I’d love to do that more again.

I got better at sales. Not good, but better. Over a year of pitching and bidding projects, and fiddling with my rates, I learned to understand the realm of possible projects that I can possibly get. There truly is a job, or a project for everyone. The tough part is finding it. The market also dictates a lot of what you can do. What a client expects to pay, receive, and what it looks like. And that offering a service at an inappropriate price point for the market you’re in, will move you into a different market. So don’t do that.

I started using CSS :has and :where selectors a lot more. I’ve developed an interesting way of adding modifiers to components in HTML by targeting attributes in CSS. There are a lot of CSS advancements that I tried in the last year, and so many more I want to explore in the coming years. I feel really excited about this.

The visual style that I can design has improved greatly. It’s the best I’ve been able to produce. I’m very happy with it. I’ve also really stretched myself and designed some interesting things that I’m proud of. I got faster, and better. I think I have a better grasp of space and typography. I want to keep improving, but I probably don’t want to get hired as a designer again for a while.

What went poorly.

50% of projects had some sort of negative outcome. Some outcomes were worse than others. But the root cause boiled down to one thing. Money.

Price

It wasn’t high enough.

When I launched the service, it was unlimited design and development for either $1,000/month, or $2,000/month. And to boot I started with a 50% discount. I wrangled up a few clients. It was great. I was even able to work for a client that wanted a triple size plan. Basically more of my time. This is where things began to get difficult.

I underestimated the amount of time It would take to deliver well for my clients. As a result I was working practically all day. Some clients would be neglected and fall by the wayside. Others that communicated more, received extra attention. This went on for a while. Some clients were happy, and our engagements ended. Others were not happy, and I did my best to make them happy. “An Unlimited revisions until you’re happy” policy, just doesn’t work unless your client will give you proper feedback.

Communication

It wasn’t good enough.

Clients are sometimes fickle, they’ll either be very happy, or they’ll act happy and then have very negative feedback about everything you’ve done for weeks. A breakdown of communication is never good. The blame can sometimes be with the other party, but the responsibility to communicate well is always on you, the service provider. As an unlimited Freelance, designer/developer guy I was already trying to do too much. Although budgets were smaller, at least initially, expectations were not any smaller. Identifying problems early, or getting feedback on progress became crucial. Over time communication issues became less frequent. I tried my best to understand, and to articulate, client expectations. To do that I followed some simple principles:

  1. Work early, and incrementally.
  2. Share early, and frequently.
  3. Verify direction and goals.

I’m not a productivity guru. Don’t blindly follow my advice. Adhering to these principles, and practicing them, made things easier. Also more fun!

No Cushion.

I had no savings.

I was operating without a buffer. Impossilbe to avoid as I was laid off in February and had to figure something out fast. I should have filed for unemployment, and started looking for another job. I started Capsule instead.

Operational cushion is a fancy way of saying Savings. Any business has ups and downs. Income months, and others that are a bust. Because I had no buffer, I was always living paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t until I almost completely stopped Capsule’s unlimited subscription, and went hourly with clients, that I was able to save a little money. Sadly, now I’m in the same position as a year ago. No savings, scrambling.

Now, My philosophy is “expect catastrophe, and be prepared”. Don’t count on future work or money. If you’re not prepared today, then you’re in danger, TODAY.

What clients really wanted.

Just hourly contributions. It was far easier for folks to buy into either larger plans, for example starting at 8k, or to just hire me hourly. This was a pretty useful lesson. The unlimited business model is a Niche idea. The market for it is small, competitive, and you probably can’t do it. Designers in this space are among the fastest, and best in the world. Other’s work a crazy amount of hours to keep up with workloads. Which in turn makes them better, and faster at their job.

I didn’t have a narrow focus, I worked on Design, front end, branding, and iOS apps. I’m not the best in the world at all of these, hell not even one of these. Splitting my focus across disciplines meant that the time I spent working 100 hours in a week, and burning myself out, didn’t pay dividends later. I got paid, but I didn’t improve fast enough.

Moving forward I’ll be reducing my services to be just Front End work, and Ghost. I won’t take on any more design clients. I enjoy designing, but I’m not good enough to do it well and fast. I think this ties into a focused philosophy that fits well with what I’m thinking. I need to train like an athlete.

Athletics.

The best athletes train to compete in a specific event. Sprint, Long Jump, Hurdles, Basketball, etc… Their training regiment and focus isn’t to be the best at everything, but to be the best at one thing. In the digital designer/developer world we often see teams that are looking for people that are really good at one thing, but also has a broad set of skills. Valve calls this a T shaped skillset. Personally looking at my skillset, and it looks more like an EmDash.

So focus on a single or a very narrow band of related skills is important. What do you want to be doing everyday? What does that look like? Now avoid everything that doesn’t fit those constraints.

Athletes TRAIN for their events. They exercise and then practice. These are different. Exercise prepares physically for an event. Practice is repetition focused on improvement. There just isn’t much exercise or practice in my routine. Curiosity? Yes. Exploration? Lots of exploration. But not much exercise or practice.

I’ve now come to think of myself as an athlete, and my career as a pursuit of perfect execution. What is the one thing I’m the best at? What am I undeniably so great at doing, that people are lining up to get me to do it? I didn’t have an answer to that question. I didn’t have a single skill that was absolutely remarkable. How am I expected to excel when nothing I do can be considered excellent?

So now I train and practice. I study the fundamentals in a circular fashion, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Typography. I pick up whatever book available on the subject, and read it like a novel. This is part of my daily routine.

I cancelled all but one side project, my programming language. I still have side projects though. But now they are purpose focused, and short. I train specifically to build websites fast, and well. That’s the whole kit and caboodle, from type and spacing, to buttons and forms. Build something fast, small, and complete. And ship it. Show it off somewhere. That’s the only way I’m going to get fantastically better. By building a thousand websites.

Anyways. Now I feel like I have a singular focus. A one thing I’m great at. I want to be the greatest at it.

So what’s next?

Capsule isn’t going away. I’m not dead. yet. I’m pursuing a full time job somewhere. Capsule is now a waypoint, a rest stop on the journey. Perhaps a favorite stop on a road I travel often. I’ll be looking for only a couple of clients. It won’t be enough to pay all the bills, and it will be focused work.

The goal is to stay out of trouble, save some money, pay some bills, and be the most reliable, stable, and fast website maker on planet earth.

If you need help building the front end of your small to medium sized SaaS or Blog. Then hire me. That’s what I do.

-kow