First app build deployed. KSK acceptance letter arrived. Website sprint completed.
Oh, and two weddings happened. Busy few weeks on all fronts...

​

Side hustle progress

Milestone Unlocked: From Idea to App Store (Sort Of)

And there is another small milestone – Matthias and I managed to deploy the first-ever build of my app into the Apple ecosystem. Even though the app is nothing more than a glorified wireframe at the moment, this feels huge. And it was, of course, a lot of pain. As we tried to deploy the app, the documentation sounded a bit like: “Create an app by adding it to an app bundle,” but there was no app bundle. When I wanted to create an app bundle, it said, “You need an app to add to the bundle.” Bonkers.

​
And no LLM was able to help, but in the end, a good old YouTube video showed us the way. Hallucinated documentation still underdelivers compared to some dedicated YouTube nerds. So next up: Google Play Store.
​

Learning Sales from a Turbo-Capitalist (When You're Allergic to Sales)

To get in the right mood, I went back to an influencer that was recommended by a fellow designer: Alex Hormozi. Strange guy. Absolute turbo capitalist. But he has some interesting takes, and the way he thinks is sometimes refreshing for me. I started the 100M$ Money Models audiobook, and it instantly sparked some ideas about what I could possibly do—not just for the app but also for my freelance work.

How to structure offers. How to upsell, downsell… To be honest, I never thought about the different kinds of offers that can be used. Yes, from my UX work, I know how to structure a pricing page and nudge users, but how to create whole offer journeys/loops with decoy offer → real offer → upsell offer → retention offer, etc.

Something strange happened after diving into Hormozi's content: I started seeing monetization strategies everywhere. Like, EVERYWHERE. That café with the "loyalty card" isn't just being nice—they're increasing customer lifetime value. The gym offering "free trial + personal training session" is a classic lead magnet into upsell.

As a UX designer, I've spent years optimizing for user delight and task completion. Remove friction, make it intuitive, serve the user's needs. Now I'm adding more and more of a “scaling” and “revenue” aspect to the mix. I was always interested in seeing design as a means to an end for creating business value; now, while building and bootstrapping my own product, this becomes more and more important.

​

Design Sprint Magic with Friends

As the development of the app progresses, it is time to think about the website and also how to market the whole thing. As I started to dip my toe into the marketing world, which I haven't done for years, I realized this is a whole universe by itself to delve into. But first, I need a website. A minimum viable product at least. So I planned a mini one-day sprint with a friend of mine. The plan was to align on a rough design direction and information architecture for the page that will serve as a briefing for him to further build the page.

He came up with the idea to use the Tailwind library, and that was an awesome idea because we could just stitch a rough structure with screenshots, and then he directly assembled the components in code.

After that was done, we did some ideation on visual language and typography and eventually found an awesome font by Grilly Type that adds, in my opinion, quite a unique touch to the page and can even be used inside the app, adding some nice details to the interface. I am looking forward to backchanneling the overhauled design language back into the app.

Defining the backend we want to use was also part of the day because my plan is to create content that will live inside the app and the web as well, and even in a newsletter, so I need a headless CMS, and we are going with Sanity.

At the end of the day, I had created accounts for Sanity, GitHub, Vercel, and I don't know where, and I don't know how to use just a single one of these tools. I will keep you posted on how the onboarding goes. 🫡

​

Freelance Front

KSK Approved – I am now a User-Centered Artist

I got accepted by the Künstlersozialkasse. After several months, I was close to giving up hope, but then the final letter arrived. By the way, this letter was ridiculously complex, and after reading it three times, I still didn't know what to do next. I threw it into an AI to analyze, and even Claude missed that the main point of the letter was that I have to transfer a whole bunch of money. It's funny because it is nowhere explicitly written that I have to transfer the money. I got this information when I called the KSK. The letter only had a money account and beside a small (s) that meant “soll” – the open demands by the KSK. Why not just say: please transfer XXX€ in the next 14 days? I don't get it…

​

How Building My Own App Transfers to My Client Work

After the sprint, I recalled how much I liked to work in time-boxed sprints during my agency time. At my current booking, we are thinking about creating a Product Vision, and I thought a 5-day design sprint could be a great starting point to align everybody and get them on the same page while simultaneously creating enough material to build upon.

Also, the Hormozi stuff kept me thinking. Working with very early-stage startups at the moment, I think it is valuable to consider how to implement some of this information into my daily work as well.

​

Stuff I stumbled across

Ever though about how 4 dimensional topology works and how you create a donut from a square applying simple rules – me neither, but I found this oddly interesting
​How to 'See' the 4th Dimension with Topology​

​

One year free perplexity pro, when connecting your paypal account.https://www.perplexity.ai/join/p/paypal-subscription​

​

The Alex Hormozi Audio Book I mentioned
​Part 1: Welcome to $100M Money Models | Ep 938​
​

A recommendation for a Design System Course, because I am Still catching up on the whole Design System Development of the last years.
​Courses at Design System University​

​
A short clip that helped me to find the hidden control to use nested properties in FIGMA
​Figma Components 101 in UI3 | Learn about Variants and Components Properties | Figma tutorial​

​

Last but not least, the new song of one of my favorite bands – Guilt Trip.

Burn Guilt Trip PREVIEW   ​

​

What's up ahead … 🍿

Up next is working on the content strategy and diving deeper into the marketing strategy. I will go on a small offsite to work on all things content more concentrated and hope that I have everything in place after that – roadmap, brand tonality, and some ideas on how to progress from there.

If you have any suggestions for practical tools, I would be glad to hear them. Tools for creating mockups, streamlining content creation, etc. I appreciate every bit of advice.

---

Greetings

Alessandro