Just as they move away from complications, I also tend to stick to friendly products: imovie instead of premier, iphone instead of android, mac instead of PC, or even websites were the format is not threatening once you open it. But honestly, not everything in life is a simple as it seems and challenging yourself once in a while is a phenomenal method to push your learning and skills forward.
For the past weeks we've been trying to push the speed of the business forward, getting crucial aspects done in a narrower period of time. As "The Lean Startup" mentions; many companies advance at their fastest speed to launch their minimum viable product, and once they have offered it to their early adopters they start with the iterations according to the feedback given. With that, they work on the most important aspects of the product to improve it and knock off any competition out in the market; in other words and as Eric Ries says, they pivot or persevere, two really important terms that are dominant over any startup business.. |
A quick anecdote: As we were about to start with the website, the first thought that came into everyones mind was not to use Weebly. Weebly is an amazing site to create free websites, it has a friendly layout, it's visually appealing, and it's fun to play around with, but for BlendZ we wanted to challenge ourselves and create a more personalized portfolio, that's why we selected Squarespace. As soon as I opened Squarespace, I can tell you from personal experience, that it was not the best welcoming for a beginner; the formatting was complex and the management of the page was completely different than Weebly, yet, it allowed us to experiment with different tools that as a whole made our website 100% customized enveloping out mission and purpose. I was scared; we had 6 days to have a clean rough draft of what we wanted our website to look like. But those 6 days were not enough with all the challenges we had on top. We were new to Squarespace, we had no idea how to use it, and we didn't believe that we could offer a spectacular website in 6 days. In fact, those 6 days were converted in 4 days of learning how to use Squarespace, and 2 days to execute the website. However, there was nothing left; we had to finish the website and put our best effort to produce aspiring work. With all the limitations we had, we were capable of developing a half-way-through website and idea of what we wanted BlendZ image to be like. Going back to what I mentioned at the beginning of the entry, this has been one of the few times that I've moved 100% out of my comfort. I received a challenge that had no road behind, I had to uptake it and move forward. Everything seemed as a zig zag, I had completely changed the directions of the path, moving from an easy working space, to one of the hardest formatting I've encountered on the internet; I changed directions from left to right. Even as hard as it was to confront such a terrifying task I was proud to develop new skills, and utilize some of my learning to produce beautiful work. Now, I hope that I keep receiving demanding tasks, because from the validated learning after this journey, it has definitely been the best way to learn, improve, and put past experience into practice. |