Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

The upcoming IA Summit will show there is a trend.

There are two sessions devoted to business success (http://www.iasummit.org/2007/conferencesession/startup_ca…) or failure (http://www.iasummit.org/2007/conferencesession/lessons_fr…).
Rashmi Sinha, our closing speaker, will no doubt encourage designers to be more entrepreneurial and hopefully give tips on how to do that. If you look closely, you may also see business aspects in this pre-conference workshop: So You Want To Be A Product Manager… (http://www.iasummit.org/2007/preconferencesession/so_you_…).

Oh, and Lou wrote about this trend in May 2006: From consulting to products and services (http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/2006/03/from…).

I would not only like to read it, but I’d also contribute–having started two companies myself. When I started Messagefirst, it was bootstrapped with $10k of my own cash. I’ve never taken investment capital or a loan to make the company work. Even this year, as we’re going through a growing year and have 4 hires spec’d out, we’ll be doing it on income, not investments from outside resources.

I work at a design consultancy that was started by three designers. Like Todd, they have created a thriving business through their own investment, by choice.

I have also been fortunate, however, to gain insight into the world of product/service development and funding through my husband’s startup. VCs, and to some extent, angel investors are looking for someone who knows every detail of the market they are trying to break into. In SV this translates into someone with an MBA, or at the very least a track record of entrepreneurship. In a pinch they will accept the engineer who built the product or service but only if his or her team includes someone with the right business chops. In essence, money guys/gals want to talk with other money guys/gals – in their minds everyone else, aside from the key engineer(s), is relatively unimportant and replaceable. Few designers, I suspect, desire to become that intimately involved in the business side of things (although there are many who are deeply into strategy, which can segue into business). Perhaps we should learn a lesson from the engineers on this one – many people with CS degrees and technical leanings go on to get MBAs and become the type of entrepreneur SV investors love.

I ran my own business for 4 years and I never took a loan – every person I talked to thought that was weird and I had no idea what I was doing “since I was a web designer”. When I decided to move on I didn’t have a single penny of debt in my name. As much as I pride myself in that, I wonder if that’s a designer trend and if that prevents us from being more agressive, and therefore successful, entrepreneurs.

Also, lots of designers are designers of things (products, interfaces, etc) – moving on to designing a business is a different frame of mind, and what the differences is between these two different frames of mind is not clear. I think the biggest misconception/challenge is having an unclear distinction between product development and business development. You can spend the whole day running the business and not develop a single product (that’s operations) – I think many designers struggle with doing biz dev/operations and prod dev at the same time. Maybe it’s because as service providers we are too used to “project” as the unit of reference? I don’t know…

Knowing a BIT about how the venture capital market works, I think it’s also difficult for designer/entrepreneurs to comprehend “going big” until they feel ready. That’s why 37Signals resonates so well with UXers.

Most VCs want entrepreneurs looking to get big quickly or get bought at a premium within a relatively short time. That’s just how VCs tend to think at this point, as they need to get leverage from their various “hits” to pay for the duds.

I’d like to see how my understanding of the VC markets are/are not accurate, or if new (or just lesser known) funding methods are available or people are thinking about them.

I would make sure to include a level of caution when thinking about taking the leap to going out on your own… Just because you love what you do (I hope) and are good at it, doesn’t mean you should open up your own shop. People need to understand that, especially when you’re first starting out, you will also have to be able to handle sales, client/project mgmt, accounting, etc. and hopefully love all that just as much (and be just as good at it).

From my experience, I went out on my own because I love being a usability/interface design consultant and I wanted to be my own boss, but I didn’t account for all the other responsibilities that go with it. I love the work that I do, but I *hate* having to handle all the sales calls, proposal writing and negotiation that has to take place before a project even begins. Unless you have the capital to hire a client relations mgr or a sales mgr this is a hat that most entrepreneurs have to wear.

Like some of the other people that have commented, I’ve never had a loan to start or maintain my biz. I think this is wise, but I constantly question whether it holds me back from growing.

Either way, I hope this article gets written and published. I would definitely be interested in reading it!

I think this could be a very interesting set of articles – perhaps looking at the different phases of opening your own business or from the perspective of how to fund, how and when/if to hire others, partner or not etc. I think CW’s talk at the IA Summit would be good to riff off of as well in terms of clearing the air about truth and lies and half truths and myths of being an entrepreneur.

I’d love to see an article on this topic. I’ve thought about making the leap from designer/product manager to entrepreuner. But just haven’t done it yet.

IEEE Spectrum just posted a new article on this topic: Becoming Your Own Boss (https://origin.www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/5001)

The article covers what you should consider before going out on your own and the questions you should ask yourself before giving up your day job.

I would like to see this article explored and believe the topic large enough to rate a small theme series.

I started interactive multimedia production in 1988 and tried establishing a CD-ROM barony in the early 1990’s so I have some practical thoughts about this industry I love. It’s hands-on, yet deeply intellectual. There’s great wealth and recognition at the high-end and personal satisfaction with the tasks we perform daily has it’s own rewards for many of us – in cubicle group, or flying solo home-office. There has always been a trade-off between professional drive and personal freedom with the largest dilemma to remember when striking out on your own is you’ll never stop working again: you either work all the time {certainly the first few years} or not enough and you fail. When taking on products everything from internal roles for those on your team to accounting procedures and tax deadlines changes as you shift from service roles.

I love it. I enjoy the challenge and always strive to make a bigger and better mark on the world and driving new and revolutionary goods to market can be very engaging and worthwhile – but again, it’s not for everyone and sometimes it’s fun just hitching ones’ wagon to a funky new train swinging by that has a nice beat. If you can, try to join a startup and see what that is like, it may not suit your needs and wants, but you’ll definitely walk away knowing more than when you entered.

We found our experience in the field informed us and expanded our professional toolsets. As we developed a number of resources and a body of knowledge, it was clear we could provide a desirable product to others in ours and related industries. I had experience growing up at my mother’s knee as she did newspaper ad-layout with beeswax and exact-o blades piling up around huge books of B+W art to be “clipped”. So, I embraced the DTP revolution and saw a ready + new market for professional images. We bought one of the first Apple CD-ROM drives and mastered Wraptures One on a CD burner the size of an industrial washing machine. I reminisce…
The point I’ll leave with is that the single greatest myth a budding entrepreneur can make is to NOT accept VC when it is offered – assuming the deal is reasonable. So convinced was I in the garage-to-megacorp myth one reads in the business pages that I crippled the long term success of my product by limiting my growth to self-funding “pioneer style”. To be fair there were life-style choices as well where my partner and I would decide things that we felt better doing, but limited the business deals – the price of a moral conscience. Long and short, I allowed plenty of time for the slower moving Image Bank, PhotoDisc, Corbis, etc to gather their monster marketing budgets and clobber the fledgling independent publishers.

Yes, there are multiple phases of this topic worth exploring – especially in light of the current economy.
I look forward to seeing what comes of this.

I had to learn a lot about Angel Investor funding (intiially) and Venture Capital funding.

A whole lot on what makes a business plan sell, a whole lot on what ideas to pursue further, that ideas are dime a dozen, and not to get too involved with the details. There is a whole lot more to owning and operating a product or service than the user experience or usability of it. I’m NOT trying to rank relative importance of functions with my last statement, just narrating my experience.

I also realized that being a CEO and being a founder are two totally different things.