It's Actually Pretty Easy to Get Ahead of 99% of Designers

It's actually pretty easy to beat 99% of designers because most designers do the wrong stuff. And me personally, I've worked with companies worth over $2 billion, and I'm making this video because I want to have designers make money doing what they love. And I think the first struggle that a lot of designers get stuck with is that they don't know if they should become a specialist or a generalist. You can be any of those. Like, there are designers on both ends that make a great living. The only problem that people have with becoming a specialist is that they're not sure which field or which specialty they should focus on. If you don't have experience in specific fields or in specific skills as a designer, then you should probably not specialize. For example, when you look at my profile and the design that I showcase, it's mostly just web design, interfaces, dashboards. These are specific skills that I want to advertise because there are multiple ways to become a specialist. You can become a specialist for specific fields. Like for example, this one, I just want to become a specialist in learning apps. So I'm just going to make designs about learning apps. Or I want to become a specialist in CRM. And if I wanted to do that, then I would just do CRM designs. That's one way to specialize. The other way would just be to be in a niche, like in an industry, for example, finance or analytics, and I would just design about that. The point is that you need to have that experience first to decide like, okay, I'm good at this specific design style or type, and I'm just going to focus on that. But if you don't know that, you have no background in that, then it's really difficult to one, figure out what to do, and two, get people to actually trust you and want to buy from you because you don't have that proof that's so essential to get deals. People advise other designers to specialize because it's so much easier to sell yourself. Because for example, here, like, my pitch could just be, I'm a product design partner for software businesses. You can get the idea that when you specialize You can easily target those specific customers, their specific pain points, because you know it. If you don't know that, then the easy path is to just generalize for now. And the benefit of being a generalist is that you can just try as many things as you can and as you want until you figure out what you like to work on, what you're naturally talented at, and what customers also like. I would advise anybody to take notes every time you have calls with clients, calls with leads. Take note of what their pain points are, what their struggles are, what are their concerns and doubts, because that will be super helpful when you talk with other people on calls, but also in your sales pitch. Like you could say, I help e-commerce stores improve their conversion rates and you have the proof to be like, okay, I can absolutely guarantee 5% because there are always stuff that I know from experience can be improved. And so to me, both are good. It's just figuring out what's the one that's going to get you the most return on your investment, on your time, on your creativity as well. The second thing that I believe is super important as a designer is to be good enough at as many things as possible. And by being good enough, I mean being market standard, which means that people want to pay someone to do that specific thing. And do you imagine if you are a designer, but you can also do, for example, like here, uh, like this is my studio website, which I've made myself. And so do you imagine if I can offer like a service, like a deal where I do their product design and at the same time I can offer like a free website design on top of the product design that I can do? Like this goes a long way. The key to customer satisfaction is to always under-promise and over-deliver. And so for example, just a simple thing is timeline. Like a lot of people would try to say they're going to do it as soon as possible, but end up taking many days because it's harder than it looks. But the smart way to do it is to reverse that. So for example, I could say, oh, this feature is going to take me 2 days, but actually I end up delivering it in 2 hours. Well, that's going to have a big impression on the customers. And you want to always consistently do that. You want to be great at a lot of different things. As a product designer, I want to be good at web design, design systems, mobile designs. Like I want my designs to be able to be responsive. I want to be good at just talking with clients, being communicative, taking notes, taking criticism in a good way. Once you start being good enough at what you do, it becomes easy. And then you end up taking the easy path over and over again because that's just how the brain works. We like the easiest solution. And so what I tend to do is to kind of follow the same pattern of like, oh, I'm going to do a web app design again and again. But then the problem is that I don't push myself to learn new things. And to get better at other skills that could really make a difference when it comes to selling my core service. And so I really think from experience that it's essential to push yourself to try to do other things, try to do more things. And that's why, for example, before I would never post, like use mockups because I just didn't know how to do them. And so I started to try to work on mockups and mockups is like one very side skill, but I think it's still interesting in my opinion. And so it was like, okay, how do I do that? Well, I have the design, so that's already a good thing, but I also need to figure out how do I make that screen? I need to make it in 3D. Okay, cool. Now how do I make that background? Because I have no idea how to do that. Oh, I can just use AI and ask it to make the background. And then with Photoshop, I can combine all of those things together and like, okay, cool. Now I know how to make mockups. That's pretty much the rule of business and how to be successful. It's just, you need so many tiny little skills that are nothing when you just take them individually, but when you stack them together like a burger, it's just huge. And I really believe that's how it's How you stand out as a designer, not necessarily how you sell yourself, but how you stand out when you work with clients. When you— how do you overdeliver? You should always focus on your specific skills and strength when you want to sell yourself to a client, but to overdeliver and to increase the odds of them referring you to other people they know and you getting more clients from them, it comes from that. And that's what most people don't do because it's difficult. And then the last thing that I really believe is essential to be good at design is just to have this mix of surrounding yourself with really good designs and improving your standards. And at the same time, backing it up with volume. And when I say volume, I don't say you need to design dozens of screens or hundreds of screens. I mean thousands of screens. It's just so much volume that it becomes almost boring to you. It's like so easy for you. You could do it in your sleep. That's how you become the top 1%. It's by being exceptional. You are the exception. While people might take a week to design a flow, you just take an hour to do that because you've done it so many times. And one way that I like to surround myself with good design is with Mobbin. It's a really good design resource, which I believe is super important because these are real designs. It's not like designs you see on Dribbble, and a lot of designs are not real on Dribbble, and it gives designers the wrong framework to think about how to design good products. And so that's why it's super cool to have these resources because then you can just pick screens or flows. You can just go through them and analyze analyze them. You're like, okay, why do they do it this way? Why is it this size? Why is it this spacing? How is the design system behind all of that? Because these are design teams and they're probably spending millions on teams of designers to figure out the right experience to give their users. And you don't have to use that. I'm just saying like you need to find real products because these are great reference to know how to design better. What's good design? What's good product design? And I recommend any designer to actually have a Figma file or Figma page where they just store all of the designs that they like. Like as soon you find a good inspiration, just screenshot it and save it. And that's going to save you so much time compared to if you have nothing and you just try to remember where you found that specific page, that specific screen. And then the last thing to do, in my opinion, to really get good at design is to find a mentor. And so there are different ways to go at it. The first one, which I think is the best, is to get paid to learn. What I would recommend anyone to do is to learn from more experienced designers. If you have in your team, take their designs and figure out why they made it this way. What's their thought process. How do they think through a scope? How do they design a feature? How do they make a flow? And this way you can both get paid, make a living, and at the same time learn a lot from them. That's how I learned. That's how I started growing and becoming better as a designer is just by learning from those more experienced designers than I was. And each designer can bring something different. Some might bring more UI and branding knowledge while others might bring more UX and process kind of knowledge. The second way that you can get mentored is to do the same thing, but you're not getting paid. Pretty much like an internship or just working for free and you exchange knowledge and experience for your time. It's not ideal. I get it. But if you have no job, you have no clients and you cannot get any, it's probably because there is a gap between where you are right now and what the market expects you to have. And to me, the only way to solve that is just to get experience, get hands-on experience and actually do the work. And for that, I really believe that you need that because I've learned so much more just by working with designers, but you need some sort of influence, some sort of source that can help you bridge the gap with knowledge that you don't have or experience that you don't have. And the last thing, in my opinion, that I think is really good is just to pay someone, pay a designer to coach you, to mentor you, to get better at design. And for that, I think the key to get the most out of it is to have a specific problem that you want to solve. For example, for me, a few years ago, I was really struggling with design systems. Like I didn't know how it worked, how to make one, what's the thought process behind it. And so I paid someone to work with me and go through the process to make a design system, to make components, to make states and variants. And all of that, I could have not learned it, or I would have probably done a bad job if I didn't pay someone to do it for me. But again, it's because I had this very specific problem that I could actually solve it. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really hope you liked it. Make sure to leave a like and subscribe. Also, YouTube thinks you will like this next So, you know, give it a watch. See you for the next one. Bye!