My Introduction
Here is a brief summary of who I am, what I do and what I am trying to do here
A great starting point would be to introduce myself and tell you what I am trying to do here.
I am a branding and web designer building my design studio. I went to school for Interactive Media Design, which made me jack of all and master of none. Starting from coding, Illustrations, Web and UX design, Ecommerce, Photo and Videography, Film making, motion graphics, and even JavaScript. (Yes, I told you jack of all, since these are all part of Interactive media.)
Anyways, I really enjoyed Web UX and Branding, which I went in-depth myself and worked on projects of various sizes with tech companies to media shops and agencies locally in Ottawa, Canada.
I love building stuff myself. Over the past few years, I have built a few things as passion projects, and the one that stands out is, I created this Digital Signage app that allows restaurants to show menus on screens without paying $40-50 per month. I liked the challenge, and most of my clients in the beginning years were local restaurants and they needed it. (I taught myself how to make APIs, CDN, Backend programming and all that jazz to make this work.) It was a lot of fun. Never thought of scaling it because I already had my plate full with design work. I still get monthly subscriptions from local restaurants from this.
Then when ChatGPT came in 2022, I became curious with AI, and at the time I had to appear for this IELTS exam, that is required by Canadian Government for foreign nationals, so I created an IELTS prep app that used OpenAI's API to evaluate my exam according to the official standards. I taught myself no-code tool Bubble in the process, and I already had knowledge of database and APIs. Turns out this was a solid product that improved my writing for IELTS to 8.5/9, which is godly, and this indirectly allowed me to become a permanent resident of Canada.
I joined a few groups on Facebook to see if I could give it to other people to use for free, but marketing and sales was not my priority.
I always wanted to create my design studio because freedom is my paramount value; nothing is more important. I could have started some AI startup or some DTC brand, but the hammer of marketing is missing in my toolbox, and it is better to start something around my core competence - Design.
So I quit my work and I am building my studio, Web-Workshop focusing on designing for Startups and Ecommerce brands. Design is something that feels like art to me. I see it as my craft, and I want to produce great work, something that can last decades, and this can only be done with right people and right clients, and for that I need to understand distribution, sales, marketing, content and scaling a business.
And here I am creating content everyday as part of mastering distribution for my design studio to attract better clients who value the creative work and talent who has the creative capacity to create great work along with me. This blog and newsletter is part of my content that I would be sharing every Sunday as "Sunday Letters," documenting the progress.
I started with Instagram videos even though they have the least ROI. Instagram does not have the intellectual audience with the capital to buy my services but thats where my friends and family members are, and I needed to use the social pressure psychology on myself. I could start posted on X and quite after 2 months because I don’t see those people in real life but not when everyone knows about your videos and look at me now, I had never posted anything on Instagram for 3 years and now I post a video everyday. I love tricking my stupid brain. What’s the point of reading so much philosophy and psychology for fun if I cannot use it as social experiments.
I consider myself to be an aspiring polymath, and learning comes very easy to me, so my content is around sharing my learnings, design work, behind the scenes of building this business and design and branding case studies.
Consider following and coming along the journey because this is just the beginning and there is a lot to create.
Gracias for reading. See you next sunday.