I
nterior Designer, Sarah Daniele,
was laid off from a design firm
and decided to try to run her
own design business. She found
one of the biggest challenges for
independent designers is finding
new customers while maintaining
her current projects, so she decid-
ed she wanted to do things differ-
ently including automating the op-
erations of her business and have
monthly recurring passive income.
She asked her software develop-
er husband to create the tools she
needed to manage her own design
business. Many other designers
who saw her software wanted to
find out how they could start us-
ing it for their business. At first, she
didn’t intend to bring the platform
to the design industry as a whole,
but after establishing the size of
the demand for the product, Sar-
ah announced she’d be building
the Mydoma Studio platform for
her design industry colleagues.
Transitioning from a design busi-
ness to a tech startup wasn’t an
easy process. She’s wanted to be
an interior designer from as long
as she could remember. She says,
“I love design so much. So, all of
the sudden, this new opportuni-
ty presented itself where I wasn’t
going to be Sarah Daniele, Inte-
rior Designer. And, I didn’t know
how to transition well out of that.
I didn’t want to disregard this op-
portunity, but it was difficult be-
cause it was who I had become
and who I wanted to be.” So, over-
coming the emotional aspects of
the transition was a challenge.
In the beginning, she was run-
ning her design business full time
in addition to building the soft-
ware. But eventually, she phased
out all the design work and was
able to focus on the software full
time. She said, “That was a really
hard day. That was the day when
clients started calling and say-
ing they wanted to hire me again
or a referral would come in and
it was just, ‘No, I don’t do design
anymore.’ And, that was terrifying.”
Not only was it scary for Sarah to
put all her efforts and attention
into something she didn’t know
would work, but was emotional-
ly challenging to put something
on the back burner that she’d
worked so hard for and been
so connected with in her life.
One of the things that she found
challenging in the beginning was
getting the early validation she
needed to prove that her software
as a service would be profitable.
“It’s one thing to go out and say,
‘Hey, I’m building this thing.’ and
have people say ‘Yeah, I want in
on that.’ and send positive emails
and sign up for a beta, but then
to actually take action and do the
things you want in the beta and
then get them to actually give you
money for that thing you are sell-
ing, that was challenging. I thought
like a lot of other entrepreneurs
out there, I thought ‘If you build
it, they will come.’ But that was
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