It’s not where you are, it’s what you do
I never thought much of my life before, but I’ve realised that my story is an awesome example that you don’t need to live in Silicon Valley, or even remotely near any vibrant design community to have a bit of success in this industry. You can make and launch a product from absolutely anywhere in the world really, with very few people and very little money.
I want to share my odd life of making Prototypr.io and working on other products from the small country of Gibraltar. I hope it shows that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you live, all that really matters is what you do!
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you live, all that really matters is what you do!
I’m far from the only one too — I’ve met some pretty inspiring people shipping products in very small teams, from what may seem to some as unlikely places. It’s quite common:
- 🇬🇷 Katerina is in Greece, and she runs unDraw with Aggelos Gesoulis as a team of 2.
- 🇺🇦 Lisa and Ahmed are in Ukraine running Flawless App. They started as a team of 2, and recently became 3 with Valia.
- 🇮🇱 Yuval runs a global UX Writing community from Israel as a solo project. Kinneret is also in Israel, and launched one of the world’s most popular UX Writing books on her own!
- 🇵🇱 Thalion is in Poland and has shipped a very popular Sketch plugin that’s widely used in the design community.
- 🇰🇷 Rob is in South Korea and runs Under Glass
Some of those places do have great design communities, but being in Gibraltar 🇬🇮, I think I can claim to be to be in the most obscure place when it comes to the design industry. There’s no real design community in Gibraltar — few people here know or care about what I do. There’s no major startup scene, we don’t have design conferences (thank god), and the biggest industry is either gambling or finance.
The one startup event that does exist is actually fantastic for crypto enthusiasts coming from business, investment and banking backgrounds. But my work pretty much gets ignored as design is of little interest at the moment.
I used to think things like, maybe I’m in the wrong place. Why does nobody care? These aren’t my people. But I realised that whilst bootstrapping products, most of my work is done on my own anyway, not too dissimilar to what it looks like in Pieter Levels’s videos during the making of Hoodmaps:
It goes to show that when your head is down working, your surroundings might not really matter that much.
Make do with what you got
I always wanted to ‘be my own boss’, working flexibly on my own products. I’m kind of doing that now, but it’s not like you would imagine. For the work side of things, this quote from Theodor Roosevelt fits well:
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
With few other remote workers in this country, large periods of my time are just spent on my own in the kitchen of a rented apartment overlooking a graveyard. I sit in a pretty uncomfortable plastic high chair, typing English on an AZERTY keyboard with the height of my screen at a slightly awkward position:
It’s not bad, but the ergonomics are a far cry from what you see on Interface Lovers. On other days I work from my friend Sophie’s (follow her) language school on my 13-inch screen with hundreds of tabs open. No retina monitors, just the MacBook. From here, Prototypr Weekly goes out to thousands of people, showing that you don’t need to be in the most popular place to make awesome stuff.
When you’re working, and actually working, do you even notice the things around you? Or just the work you’re doing?
A cooler example that I’d like to try one day is Jakob Class’s setup from GitHub. He’s running Ruby on Wheels where he works on the go in a van:
Deep work
I think this all works because whilst making things, I find the nonsense around me fades away as the actual process of doing comes to the forefront. Cal Newport, calls this ‘deep work’:
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.
This is the important part, and it’s what all of us can do, from wherever you may be. Start with a vision of your product and imagine lots of people using it — and then consistently chip away until it reaches that vision. At the end of the day, when pen comes to paper, you’re on your own anyway — nobody can do your life work for you.
So if you’re feeling frustrated in a small town somewhere, thinking you need to join a big city to get anywhere; or you’re waiting for something to come along, I hope this encourages you to just get started where you are and with what you can get hold of.
P.s. Here is one thing I’m making right now 🐒 You can sign up to join me on my journey and hear more stories.
Shoutout to Startup Grind Gibraltar!
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