Studio Talk 5・Maïa Hariton
I met Maïa in one of my Squarespace groups and always love how helpful and engaged she is. Her path to running her own web design business is so inspiring and I love the openness with which she shares her journey here. I was glad to see that she listed ‘having a safety net’ as one of her five tips - that’s one I feel very passionate about as well. Her fifth tip is also spot on and very important if we want to create our own successful business.
I moved to the United States from Paris, France to study and stayed in the country after meeting my now husband. I started my career as a software engineer in 2014 because I wanted to solve problems to make people’s lives easier. A year later, I decided to fill a creative void and dove into the design space.
After a few years in design and code, I began collaborating with amazing people by building their websites so that they could offer their clients the best experience online. My goal is to figure out what a client’s goal is for their business and translate it into a design and a website that serves them in the best way.
I have just moved to Vienna with my husband after traveling the world as a digital nomad for five years which was an amazing adventure!
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1) What is your professional background and how did you get into Squarespace web design?
I graduated with a Political Science degree from school. I was always fascinated by how countries and the whole world worked; I wanted to make it better. I also worked as a freelance translator online which was my first experience working for clients remotely and figuring out how to find clients online in general.
I worked at a few non-profits in Washington DC and San Francisco and some of them asked me to update the organization’s websites, a task I volunteered for even though I knew nothing about coding or design at that point but I felt like it would be a great challenge. I spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out the best way to make those websites more useful for people looking for information.
I quickly realized that I loved making those website updates more than what I was doing for the remaining hours of my workday. My husband had also been learning how to code during the weekends so we both challenged each other to learn as much as we could by ourselves. It was also around that time that we both realized that we wanted to travel the world for a while, to work remotely and travel as much as we could for the foreseeable future. So we both decided to learn how to code. We would challenge each other on various coding challenges and became self-taught software engineers.
After about half a year of intense training, I was hired at Autodesk as an engineer and worked there for about two years. I learned so much about best coding and design practices from the people I worked with but I felt like I was interested in a lot more and wanted to learn more about design. It was a couple of months later that my husband and I decided to quit our jobs so that we could travel the world. This was in 2015.
My first time being a freelance developer was hard since I knew nothing about finding clients or marketing myself in that online world. So when my first client hired me to build her a Squarespace website (which I had never used before), I said yes to the project. I fell in love with the platform mostly because it seemed easy to explain to clients how to use it and it was much faster for me to build websites on it versus a custom coded website. I had always been attracted to the design side of websites so Squarespace gave me the opportunity to dive into it.
From then on, I worked exclusively on Squarespace projects for about a year to get familiar with the platform as much as possible. Most of my work has luckily come through word of mouth since I’ve been working as a designer and developer for the past 5 years and my clients have been recommending me to their clients, which is pretty much the best thing. I’m so grateful for the people I’ve met through this adventure and can’t imagine doing anything else now.
2) What was your safety net (e.g. a partner, another job, savings etc.) when you first started out and how did that help you?
My safety net at the beginning was my husband who had a steady job and we also had savings. Since we had decided to travel the world and become digital nomads, we had been saving money for about two years and felt pretty confident that we could quit our jobs. We made a monthly budget of our expenses and knew what we had to earn to be confident that we could pay our bills and keep saving.
We started our travels in South East Asia which had a much lower cost of living compared to San Francisco! I have to admit that even though we had a good safety net, we were still pretty stressed out about not earning as much money as we were used to. But I think that’s something you always feel when you work for yourself. Depending on our financial situation, we often would stop in a cheaper location so that we could save up some money and keep going.
3) How many websites did you design during your first year and how did your clients find you?
It’s hard to remember - I think I built about fifteen websites during my first year. Most clients found me through what is now called Upwork. Word of mouth also was and still is huge for me. I told everyone I knew about what I was doing so they recommended me to their friends. I also got to know more designers around the world who would ask me to help them customize their websites.
4) Do you have a niche market, or a speciality, or are you more of a generalist?
I used to be a generalist but I am changing my services to focus more on custom-built websites and building websites for designers who need their designs of a website implemented either on Squarespace, Shopify or Wordpress. So a designer would be working with their client on branding and design, I would then take over and build their website.
I’ve been doing that type of work for the past year, partnering with design agencies and web designers. I love collaborating with other creatives because I felt like we connected better in some way. I’m also currently working on products I could offer web designers specifically to make their work easier.
5) What are your five top tips for starting your own business?
1. Have a safety net
I don’t think I could have kept going if we didn’t have money saved up in the beginning, it was scary but at least we knew that we could keep going for a while before we had to panic and quit what we were doing and go back to an office job.
Budgeting was something I resisted for a while, mostly because I had never learned how to do it properly. Saving as well - I had just been in the workforce for a couple of years and would go over budget quite a bit But I had a clear goal that motivated me. Even saving 10% of your paycheck each month makes a difference in the end and I was privileged to be able to be able to do that for a while.
2. Don’t quit your job until you have some regular clients and a good idea of what you want to do.
I had an idea of how hard it could be to find clients online so I think I resisted quitting my job for a while because it scared me so much. My husband and I started working in the weekends while we both had a full time job, just to see how we could work while traveling. I think that it took me a couple of years to figure out what I really wanted to do but even those weekends helped quite a bit to hone in on what worked for me, what made me happy, and how I wanted to work.
I think that if I had quit my job and then had to figure all of those things out, I would have been so much more anxious. Kind of thinking, “Okay you don’t have a job, now what do you want to do with your life?”. It’s still terrifying but less so once you know where you’re going.
Have at least a one year plan for your business. It will change, but having that plan will help you make your first decisions like: who do you want to work with? How do you want to work? How do you want to be seen by your clients?
3. Be very strict with your boundaries.
I took so many low paying jobs in the beginning. I was just so happy to get any work that I didn’t even know how much I was undercharging. I also took on clients that were horrible to me, that wanted me to work crazy hours with almost no boundaries.
I realized that in my first year of working for myself when I looked up from my computer and it was 3:30am and I felt miserable replying to a horrible email from a client for whom I had gone way beyond our agreed scope of work. The next day I wrote down the things I would do, the clients I would say no to, the reasons I wanted to do this in the first place, and my hours of operation which I would add on all of my work emails.
The first reason I had decided to work for myself was to have more freedom and spend time with the people I loved, not to be attached to my computer all of the time. I also knew when I worked best so I adapted my hours to my most productive times, not the hours that worked for everyone else but me.
Finally, I realized that saying yes to everyone wasn’t working for anyone. I’m still working at it but I started saying no to projects that didn’t seem to be a good fit.
4. Setup a strict work/life balance.
You will want to work all the time in the beginning so that you can make more money or have more projects which will make you feel better about your business, but your personal life could greatly suffer from it. As I mentioned above, I would work all night for some projects and even though I am a night owl, I think it definitely messed with my sleep. We were also traveling so I would work most afternoons and evenings if we were visiting the city we were in at that time during the day. It felt great knowing that I had the freedom to travel while working remotely and being able to juggle both took some time to figure out. But that was the main reason why I started my business in the first place!
5. Don’t compare yourself with others.
It took me a long time to stop comparing myself to others and to be honest, I probably still do it a bit. When I started I kept on seeing those “Make six figures in months!” blog articles online and felt like a complete failure. I couldn’t understand how they did it without help or money on the side. I kept looking at designs online and couldn’t stop telling myself that I would never be as good as those people online. That’s why I quit Instagram for a while, it was becoming toxic for me and made me very depressed.
I now remind myself that everyone is different and that’s a good thing! People will hire you for you and your work so stop trying to emulate others. It’s hard and when I started I really wouldn’t have believed I could do what I am doing today.
Maia is kindly offering a 20% discount on her custom design and development services for readers of this blog - just mention KerstinMartin.com when you enquire.
