Why Did I Make Orbit Templates?
Because designers are secretly serial entrepreneurs.
Four reasons:
- Realization
- Financial freedom
- Lifestyle freedom
- To find my passion and mission
Realization
It was during the summer between my sophomore and junior year, and I was just then coming to understand the skills that I was learning in a broader picture. The best way to describe it is a mental shift where I began to think more like an employer than an employee. What do I mean by that exactly?
I mean that education in general, but design education too, preps students to become an employee somewhere. I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing because we need a lot more employers than employees. A majority of people probably should be working somewhere. But the skills of design I think are so well tailored to suit the serial entrepreneur. Especially because the idea of design thinking which undergirds the creative process boils down to solving problems for people. And from a business perspective, that’s a really great skill set to have. If you can find a need and meet it well, there has to be money in that.
And Orbit is a project where I can meet the need of helping people who want to sketch.
Financial Freedom
Furthermore, there’s been this aspect of passive income that I’ve always found fascinating. To put a lot of effort into something and build a stream of income that can function without you at a point is incredible. I like to think of it as an even more refined, or pure type of income where the conversion rate might be 50:1. $50 dollars earned directly as a result of your time might produce $1 of income earned passively. That’s not a hard and fast rule, it’s just the way I think about it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that trading time for money is just ridiculous, even if you’re making an absurd amount of money per hour, say $150/hr. While that’s more stable, I enjoy the risk of getting nothing in the beginning with the potential of an income source that will generate revenue that could far outpace that hourly rate.
Orbit is a way for me to build intellectual property (design patent pending), a marketing plan, and systems that will keep cash flowing even when I’m not working on it. Any day of the week I would take $1k-$2k passive income per month over a 6 figure salary at Google. That’s because, if I can get to that point, it will mean that I’ve built the far more valuable skill set of starting a company from scratch to being fully functional. What’s even more important, is that I can use those skills on an even larger project.
The ultimate goal is to build as many passive streams of income as possible. Orbit is my first attempt.
Lifestyle Freedom
This next idea is kind of tied to my thoughts about income, though it might seem pretty insignificant. But I absolutely despise the 9–5 where you sit down all day. And I have tried standing desks, but nothing does it for me — I just end up sitting again. I had an internship during the summer after my freshman year and I was working four 10 hour days a week. After just a few weeks, I was experiencing back pain, and the thought of a career where that’s normal seemed like hell.
I want the freedom to actually workout throughout the day, and just move around without feeling guilty about clocking hours that I’m not specifically working. Having to rely only on myself means that I don’t need to worry about being inefficient for someone. If I’m not as productive as I need to be, I’m the only one who has to bear the consequences. But having Orbit (and hopefully many more businesses down the line) will give me the flexibility in lifestyle to maintain a high degree of fitness.
I’ve heard it said many times, “Oh, once you’re working and have a family and kids, you’ll get fat. It’s just how things work.”
No. Current Isaiah can’t bear the idea of future Isaiah being fat.
I know I’m fitting in the mold perfectly of the starry-eyed young adult who says, “I’m going to be different!”, but dang it, I’m going to fight tooth and nail to be different. And that means building a career that will enable me to live the lifestyle I want — jacked out of my mind.
To Find My Passion and Mission
Another problem I have with going down the employer track for designers is that I don’t think it requires you to think critically about the larger scale mission you could potentially have. When your skillset affords the ability to think bigger, why put a cap on the scale of the thing you create by going to work for another company? Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you don’t seriously decide what you want in life, the mission of your employer will become your mission. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in general, but if you have the means to build what you want, I think that’s a far better option. But you have to be the one to decide what that looks like.
Making the decision to create a product line forced me to consider where I wanted it to go in life. It acted like a crossroads where I had to decide what I wanted to put my time towards. Either the hard entrepreneurial path with risk or the monotonous employee path climbing a corporate ladder. To me, the former is far more enjoyable. Give me all the risk!
It wasn’t until after I launched Orbit that I was able to put it into words, but the underlying feeling I was experiencing the whole time was the fact that I love the intersection of business and design. As a result, serial entrepreneurship is the perfect mission for me (and I think a great one for product designers in general).
A class project I had right as I was developing Orbit (November 2020) was a “hire me” video for my studio class. It was something you could show to employers that would demonstrate a little bit more about who you are, yadda yadda, with the hopes of beating out other candidates.
Well… I did the opposite. A “Don’t Hire Me” video. It’s a perfect time capsule that shows the exact point when I made the shift in my mind that I’m working for myself — not someone else. And Orbit was the project which helped bring that about.
