Ritco Williams explores how founders get categorized by others and why vague self-presentation blocks help. He realized his core skill is UX design, which he reframes as building businesses. Clear identity matters for networking and moving beyond friends and family to real customers.
Chapters
I was kind of trying to figure out business strategy and how to move from zero to one or get to that point where you, you go from like friends and family to actual customers in terms of business. And I realized how much of this depends on the founder and like the founder's like persona and who they are and how you even connect your business to your friends and family. And so I had to think of like, well, Well, when you meet somebody, they categorize you. They put you in some kind of grouping so that when they find a way to help you, they can, right? You might be the basketball player, the coach, the designer, the marketer. But sometimes you can put yourself in a position that's too vague and they don't know, right? So they can't make that connection to help you. So I had to think like, well, who am I? What am I? Am I Ritzy the entrepreneur, Ritzy the candle guy? Well, it really depends. When I go into a room, what am I gonna introduce? And it also depends on the room, but just thinking around how I saw it, I talked to some friends and family. So I was talking to my dad. I said, "My dad, how do you see yourself?" He goes, "Ah, you know, I do everything." And then I said, "Well, in your dream state," "Are you famous?" All right? And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, I'm famous." I said, "So what are you famous for?" And he goes, "My style." And I said, "Well, style is not a job, right? Unless you're a stylist or something like that. So how do people know about your style?" He goes, "You know, from my videos and from music." And I said, "Oh, okay. So you're a musician. That's what you are. You do music." And he goes, "Yeah, I guess I'm a musician." And I thought, "Okay, well, what am I? How would you put this to me?" He goes, "Well, you're a thinker. You like to do a lot of thinking." about stuff. And I go, yeah, you're right. Now what job is that? Like what job do you think about a lot of things, you use research and create stuff? 'Cause I like to create businesses and stuff. Oh well, it just made me realize, oh, I'm a user experience designer. That's what I do. I'm a user experience designer. Now the challenge for me though was for some reason, I didn't connect that to who I was. I don't know if I like, in my past I kinda always, I had played basketball and I had seen it a certain way and I didn't, it didn't sound like an engineer or it didn't sound, like it just didn't have the, I didn't connect it with the pride that I should have. And so I was talking to my brother and he gave me some good tips. He was just like, the challenge with UX design is people don't know what it does. And you can define it how you want. You build businesses. That's what you do. A UX designer is someone who builds businesses. And I was like, you got a good point. So I realized that is really what I am. I'm a user experience designer. I think of solutions that are usually related around people, users, and I design solutions. So that's me, Ritzy Williams, the UX designer.
