It was a poor decision

Back in 2013, I decided to turn my web design skills into a business. “What can go wrong?” I thought, “Everybody would love a beautiful website.” Instead of making a business plan, and getting business and sales coaching, I decided to “follow my #passion”, “because the #money will eventually come” (probably the worst advice I got from internet #influencers and #motivation Gurus).

Fast forward, my first venture failed, leaving me cashless, in debt, and on the job market!

”I cannot find enough #clients to stay in business,” I said to my old brother on a Saturday afternoon, feeling desperate, a few minutes after switching the “Founder/CEO” title on my LinkedIn profile with a more humble “Senior Front-end Developer”.

Know your ideal customers

One reason for my business failure was the lack of knowledge of who my ideal #customers were. I assumed “#webdesign customers are everywhere”.

The following questions never dawned on me:

👉🏾 What do you know about your ideal customers?

• What do they look like?
• What are their needs?
• What are they struggling with?
• What can you help them with?

I was improvising, relying only on my #skills, passion, and the #goodwill of prospective customers.

The same principles apply to User Experience and Web Design

In #uxdesign, we have the concept of #persona. A persona is a composite of all the knowledge designers are gathering about customers. The persona helps designers create an emotional connection with users, through that connection, designers #understand, #empathize and #create the type of solutions that get to the heart of users’ problems while satisfying business objectives.

With a persona, I have to power to make design #decisions that I know will benefit both my clients and their customers. I know what features to add, what fonts to use, what pages to create, and what language to write on the website

Takeaway

Customers vary in tastes, needs, and expectations. We cannot satisfy everyone, and not everyone need or can afford our service. Once I started being clear about “who my target customers where”, and that I mobilized my efforts preparing for them, the game started to change.

“A website that drives business growth is first built on a deep knowledge of customers”, anything else is improvisation.