From Graphic Designer to Side Hustler, to Full-time Business Owner: My Story
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I just hit a milestone—my business turned four! No, not my age, though sometimes it feels my company has its own personality. Hard to believe it's been that long. Seriously, sometimes it feels like forever since I started side hustling in 2015. So technically, I'm approaching a decade, but let's stick with four years since I went full-time in 2020! 😳
To celebrate this milestone, I wanted to share a bit of my journey, tell you where I came from, why I pivoted from graphic design to web design, and finally into entrepreneurship & education.
So grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, then I’ll dive right in!
Early Creative Hobbies
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been the artsy type. In elementary school I quite literally “played” in apps like Paint, and later created ‘graphic designs’ and page layouts in Publisher for fun.
In high school, I found acrylic painting as a hobby and had so much fun playing with those, or drawing & sketching. I was curious about making a career in the arts, doing something creative, so I asked my high school Art teacher for a bit of guidance. Options? I had no clue what they were back then.
Surprisingly, he suggested medical illustration. 😂 As you can imagine, that did not sound appealing to me at all. Sure, it’s creative, but not my kind of creative & probably required talent I didn’t have (or didn’t want to develop). Still, it nudged me in the right direction, steering me toward the art program in college.
I started college classes in 2005 & got a bunch of my academic classes out of the way, so it wasn't until my sophomore year that I began taking lots of art classes and started figuring out where my talents really shined &/or what I really loved to do.
First Design Job & Career Progression
Around the same time, in 2006, I landed my first in-house design gig for a whopping $6 an hour while juggling classes alongside that full-time job. At that point, I had my own little apartment, groceries & gas to buy, and bills to pay.
I worked there until I got married in 2008, then we moved out of state & I transferred universities. I was lucky to be offered to keep my position, but change to an independent contractor & work remotely from across the country. I did that until about 2009 or 2010, when the business slowed and my hours waned, so I had to get a ‘real’ job which was a bit heartbreaking after experiencing so much newfound freedom.
After that, I remember applying to the local Bath & Body Works but their hourly rate was atrocious compared to the $15/hr I’d been getting as a remote worker with my old job.
I quickly realized $15/hr was NOT the norm or even the state’s minimum wage, and ended up I trying different gigs over the next few years:
Kennel Worker, taking care of (& cleaning up after) the dogs in a large animal hospital boarding area; I loved seeing the animals every day but the pay was shit, the job could be gross, and the hours were awful ––coming in 2-3x a day, from 5am to 7:30-8a, then over lunch if capacity was full, and again in the evenings after closing between 4:30 and 7p. We walked the dogs outside for poddy breaks, fed all the boarded animals, and cleaned up after them too, doing tons of laundry, power washing stalls, mopping, sweeping, bathing, –ick. I developed a strong stomach! 😂 I stayed for about a year, maybe?
I was also a receptionist at an eye care clinic for a while, but talk about toxic ––the whole office was like a clique and I always felt like an outsider. I stayed as long as I could, maybe 6-12 months, but eventually quit spontaneously because I was so miserable.
Then I found out the Kennel Manager position was available at the animal hospital I’d worked at, which paid a bit more & offered more hours. But most of that job was managing people who made almost nothing, so of course no one really cared about doing a “great” job –so I was making schedules, hiring & firing people my age, and quite literally doing the dirty work for over 100 kennel stalls between the workers shifts. Again, having access to the animals ALMOST made it worth it, but not quite. I quit after about a year.
I don't remember everything else I tried, but all throughout I was designing stuff (freelancing, I now know) in some form alongside my classes, whether it was freelance, class work, or just fun projects for myself, I kept creating.
Struggles & Realizations
Fast forward five years or so, I got my first long-term, full-time in-house design job in early 2012 and stayed until mid 2020, almost 9 years.
In my late twenties, I found myself questioning everything at that job! I finally realized what I’d need to make as an adult to be comfortable (vacations, insurance, bills, taxes, etc), and I thought, “Is this it… ?” I had the job I’d wanted, that my college classes were for, yet I couldn’t afford life.
I felt like I was having a midlife crisis, but in my 20s. For millennials, like myself, so many of us were saddled with overwhelming student loan debt & a degree that did not award us the job or income to pay it off, no benefits, no health insurance, no paid sick leave, and little paid time off at my job. We were living paycheck to paycheck, scheduling bill due dates on a precarious ledge, and literally tallying the cost of every item we put into our cart so we’d know how much food we could afford when buying groceries. “Vacations” were trips south to my parents house, where we stayed for free but at least they were in a beach town & I got to see my sisters who lived there too.
That's enough for a crisis, am I right?! 🙃
I kept wondering, "Is this what my work life will be until I retire? Can I even think about retiring? What would I retire with?" The idea of working until I’m dead, while living paycheck to paycheck, massive student loans, and no access to health insurance, literally seemed impossible.
That's when it hit me like a ton of bricks… what I’d thought “adult” life would be like, was wrong. The college education didn’t help. I never got my degree, dropping out just shy of 10 credit hours (which would’ve been 2-3 remaining classes) when my loans capped & I couldn’t borrow enough to finish & even if I could’ve my department’s curriculum changed and required me to take classes I couldn’t manage or schedule with the 90min commute to campus and my full-time job, one of which was Spanish III.
Everything felt stacked against me, and something needed to change. My husband & I were both in similar job and college situations, but we needed to make more money just to survive.
Side Hustle Beginnings
I figured I'd keep doing what I'm good at; doing more of the same print design work, but for people outside my day job through word of mouth.
Fast forward to 2015—that's the year things really kicked off “for realz.” Before then, I spent three years happily working full-time with no real plans to change course. I loved my job for a good stretch, but gradually started feeling trapped by the lack of freedom, the toxic employee culture, and the work/life imbalance.
Turns out, my inner control freak was NOT thrilled with being forced to show up every day to the same place, do the same shit, for customers that paid peanuts but thought they ruled the world, & manage work orders in the most inefficient ways while management did not care to adapt to our creative needs and on unrealistic timelines.
While I’m not a giant fan, it was like TSwift says, “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me!” 😂 🙋🏻♀️
At least partially, anyway. Can I handle being told what to do? Sure, but do I like it? Not when I’ve found a better/faster/easier way that still provides quality work, and am then told to go back to the inefficient ways.
Actually, most of us probably don’t love being jerked around like that, but for me, it became a toxic environment. As a creative, eventually, it just felt fucking suffocating. We got whiplash from comments like, “you don’t give a damn” (wholly untrue), mottos like “more art faster,” and the odd/rare compliment told to visitors while passing through our work area that ‘these people are what makes us great! we wouldn’t be as good without them.’ 🙄😒
WHICH ONE WAS IT?! Because it can’t be all of them. 🤣
Individually, the people were fine, but how we worked together sucked donkey balls. Over time, since nothing ever seemed to be good enough, it turned truly toxic for my creative spirit.
But it was "devil you know"—it was familiar and stable, even if it wasn't the right fit. Living in a rural area didn't help much either; switching jobs meant longer commutes since public transport wasn't an option. So I stuck around—probably way too long.
Honestly, it was a solid learning experience & I wouldn’t be stronger for it, had I not stayed so long. Many of those lessons about dealing with crappy client feedback, lack of feedback, managing revisions, and juggling team communications? Yep. Learned a lot of it there. It taught me what to do and what not to do.
Ultimately though, I got to a point where it was clear: I had to move on.
COVID-19 Changes & Navigating Unemployment
In 2020, COVID-19 finally began to reach & effect our area. Suddenly, the business took a nosedive and it was dramatic. We went from four in-house designers to three pretty quickly. Then, we all got switched to part-time schedules and two of us started working from home temporarily to avoid our longer commutes.
That shift was a game-changer for me, and it was now the second time I’d been “allowed” to work from home, but almost 10 years apart.
When COVID pushed me to work from home again as an adult in my early 30s, I discovered something extremely valuable: I'm genuinely good at this!
I’m disciplined enough to get the work done when I need to. I work faster without constant interruptions from phone calls, emails, chatty coworkers, and fighting off the toxic teamwork office vibes. I had more time just because I didn’t have to commute 30 minutes each way.
I found my groove. It was refreshing to finish tasks quickly and efficiently in my own space. Blaring music or playing the TV in the background to listen while I worked, taking an afternoon walk with my dog, breaking for lunch when I wanted, not “getting ready” for work because we didn’t have video call meetings so no one cared what I looked like while I worked. 😂
It was heaven for me! And I didn’t really “need” the office, not even for the social stuff or human connection, etc. As an introvert, I had no problem not talking to anyone all day until my husband came home, and not leaving my house for days on end, outside of my daily walks with Luna. 🐾
When the threat of COVID became more manageable, and the business began to pick up again, enough to bring us back to the office one or two days a week, so we’d be ready to handle incoming orders (that were in reality, still few & far between), ––returning to the office again felt like a shock.
It was really hard to adjust back to in-person work, office schedules, commutes, and less free-to-be-me time, ––especially when I knew the job could easily be done from my house and actually done more efficiently (ie: actually wasting less time).
Then came the call back to the office and back to regular hours. It felt like stepping backwards or falling into a deep, dark, scary pit. I felt like a scared cat with its back arched, fur floof’d & standing on end.
I was desperate not to go back to “the before times.”
The year before, I’d had a conversation with my employer about feeling burned out. I mentioned I might need a break and potentially wanted to phase myself out and find a different job.
Now, my employer remembered that conversation, and with business teetering between potential financial ruin and picking back up here & there, he had to cut another person. So he offered me a furlough, asking if that would help with my burnout, knowing I’d needed a break.
I jumped at the chance! It was the break I needed, in every possible way.
Full-Time Freelancing Journey
Stepping into the world of full-time freelancing was a big leap though. In June 2020, I mentally quit my job and took the furlough, leaning on unemployment for a few months to figure it all out—which was exactly what this risk-averse introvert needed!
I got about 6 months to dive in full-force, learning what I needed and practicing with each project until I began to feel like I’d finally figured it out.
In 2021, I officially quit and my unemployment ended. I was on my own! 😳
Read this post next if you want to know what that first full year of self-employment looked like!
Thankfully, it all worked out! Their business slowly bounced back, and they filled my position. Meanwhile, I slowly but surely gained my footing. By 2023, I had replaced & doubled my 9-5’s income.
I wouldn’t say it was a totally smooth transition, but we’ve been very lucky & made it work.
Building a Business & Learning from the Past
I've got loads of employee experience, —mostly with small businesses, which I think of as ‘corporate’ but it was nowhere near that level of rigidity and if it had been, hopefully I would’ve had benefits & slightly higher pay with the extra stress & oversight.
Over all those years though, I was often the face of the company’s art department, being the preferred person to meet with clients & talk about designs, discuss revisions, etc. I hated following unnecessary said and unsaid rules without questioning why they existed, handling clients & orders a particular way that worked for management but not for us in production, and sticking to waste-of-time processes I hated (or often, a lack thereof).
When I realized the ones making the decisions were never required to adapt to changes WE requested, but we were always required to adapt to changes THEY requested, my inner toddler came out screaming (only in my head). Management refused to truly “hear” & understand our complaints or efforts to make things run more efficiently because it’d require them to change what they did a little too. Instead they choose to remain oblivious, even obstinate & obtuse, to the roadblocks or time-wasters that severely affected both our time & morale.
Shaping My Own Processes & Boundaries
So when I began my own journey, I bought courses from other successful designers to see their methods & processes to help guide my own. I revamped my contracts, set up a client portal to collect content for custom projects, and became more strict about my boundaries, deadlines, and project structures.
Thanks to my tendency to be a people-pleaser, I was hyper-aware of not allowing clients to run the show (or my life). And I knew I might love my own work so much that otherwise, I'd end up answering emails at 8 p.m. or starting work first thing in the morning before I’d even had coffee or breakfast.
Setting up repeatable processes helped me create boundaries and work toward achieving a better work-life balance.
…and Finding the Challenges
Early on, I was clear about what I wanted. I had people in my life who inspired me—proof that if they could do it, so could I! 💪🏻😃
While I preferred to put on blinders & be an idealistic visionary of what COULD be, other people in my life worried the time it took to become successful would be slower than I’d hoped, softening my resolve, and breaking my heart. They thought I might get discouraged if things didn't work out the way I expected, as fast as I’d hoped, or be financially sustainable as I slaved away working practically 24/7 for a long time.
But instead of heartbreak, it just fueled my resolve. I flat out refused to give up when I could see the possibilities so clearly!
Those slow but hard years specifically gave me plenty of time to sit with the feeling of it all moving at a snail’s pace, making me feel “all the feels.” I faced impostor syndrome, fear, and doubts about being good enough or knowing enough to make it work.
Plus, it wasn’t just design work. I was also learning marketing, business management, handling taxes, time management, customer service, bookkeeping, and tons of other admin stuff —it all felt daunting to realize just how much I didn’t know.
Through it all, I just COULD NOT let my vision of freedom go. I was like a dog with 🍖 bone, and over time, my persistence began to pay off. Even when the path felt slow and full of obstacles.
Facing these challenges head-on is what built my resilience, and my support network gave me both the mental & emotional support I needed to wade through the bullshit as I waded through it.
Embracing the Messy Start
Wading through the gobs of blogs and videos and courses, trying to figure out taxes, bookkeeping, systems, processes, support, marketing, expenses vs income, how to pay myself, ––all the things that come with self-employment and that glorious freedom… It was messy for a long time, and sometimes it still is!
But when you're starting out and have no clue what’s what, starting messy is your only option. If you try to do it all perfectly, or wait until “the right time,” nothing gets done or you may never actually start.
When I say “messy,” I mean it was all trial and error, sometimes doing things “wrong” for a while before I figured out the better way, and I don’t think there’s really a way around this stage. You might be able to shorten it, but you can’t skip it!
Finding Clients & Deciding on Services
At first, my only clients were either family, or friends of my family & friends. So here's a tip: if you need clients, just ask around; tell people what you do & what you’re looking for. Chances are, someone knows someone looking for what you offer! That’s how I got started—word of mouth.
Then I decided web design was 1,000% more exciting than print design and since print design and branding had been what I’d worked on since 2006… I was ready for the change.
I began that pivot with my own website redesigns, then helped out a few relatives for free for practice, and it snowballed from there. Friends of friends reached out, and soon I had a steadier stream of web projects, even if they weren’t dream clients &/or dream projects.
Since my education & experience centered around print design work though, I was hesitant to truly drop it so for a while I did a bit of everything:
T-shirt designs
Logos
Brochures
Booklets and pamphlets
Business cards & letterheads
Posters
social media graphics
lite social media management
basic video editing
website design & related edits
branding,
some consulting, etc
If you can name it, I probably tried designing it.
…But after a while, I realized print design truly wasn't my passion anymore and I had to drop it completely to make room for the work I really wanted to attract more of.
A Pivot to Teaching
I quickly dropped most of the work I didn’t enjoy, stopped advertising that I even had the skill to do that stuff, and slowly but surely I began to attract more of the type of web design work I actually enjoyed!
Eventually, through teaching clients how to use their new website and sharing how-to articles on the blog to attract DIY-ers to my services (which works, BTW), I found my true passion isn't just in creating/editing websites; it was in teaching others. Now, all these years later, I’m happy to say that teaching has become my focus, but I still do some client work to fill my creative soul.
Feeling Stuck & Rebranding
The most fascinating part of this tale is probably how I went from a “professional” service provider going by “Studio 1862” to the much more casual Launch the Damn Thing®!
Back in 2015, my business had the incredibly original name of Katelyn Dekle Designs—seriously, I couldn't muster up anything else. 😂
Then after many discussions with loved ones, together we came up with Studio 1862. Why? The original portion of our cabin, where we lived at the time, was built in 1862, ––which is precisely where my office nestled.
From around 2016 to 2020, I ran my freelance work as Studio 1862. But by 2020, I was exasperated with my own brand—switching fonts, colors, and logos more times than I care to count or admit, and redoing the website felt like an endless task because I was ALWAYS changing it up.
Nothing about my brand felt “right” longterm. The changes would be exciting, ––until they weren’t and then I’d change it again but I had no idea WHAT I didn’t like so none of the changes ever fixed anything.
Find out more about my rebranding journey, in this blog post!
In 2020, with all my newfound free time to build my business full-time, I thought, "Why not build a template shop?" So, I did. But, sticking it in my studio business somehow didn't sit well, so I branched out with a whole separate business.
Smart move, right? E-commerce in one & services in the other! Wrong.
Imagine juggling double of everything:
2 website hosting plans
2 domains
2 email marketing lists to grow & manage
2 sets of social media accounts on each platform & the content for each
customers & products to manage & support for e-commerce
clients & services to provide
marketing to 2 different audiences who didn’t want the same thing (done-for-you or DFY, vs DIY) required 2 different types of messaging & positioning
As if that wasn't challenging enough, I built the new template shop site on ShowIt, thinking it offered better design control and features, even though it did NOT have built-in commerce. That meant selling the actual templates via Shopify’s Lite plan. I quickly realized that building out the shop with embedded buy buttons & creating that shop-structure from scratch was a huge headache I was not prepared for.
Plus, I also needed support materials to deliver with the templates, which was basically my first attempt at a course, and that needed to be hosted with a third-party service, which was yet another app/expense.
Becoming Launch the Damn Thing®
Naming the template shop "Launch the Damn Thing®" was a game-changer though, and rocked every boat I had in my fleet. 😂
Through managing both businesses for just 1-2 months, I realized I dreaded making content & marketing for Studio 1862 and being my old business persona—Corporate Katelyn, all buttoned-up and professional.
It felt emotionally exhausting to be “Corporate Katelyn” all the time. Eight or more hours a day of not being yourself? No, thank you! That’s why I quit my 9-5, right? (Freedom!)
As the face of Launch the Damn Thing® something in me shifted. In that business, I could just be myself. My unconventional business name, the bold/fun font choice and vibrant color scheme echoed the fun & freedom I needed in my career in order to enjoy my work & not feel trapped, while attracting an audience of more like-minded people that were fun to work & interact with.
So? It was time to kick one to the curb. I couldn’t manage both separately, so I decided to merge the two brands and kill the one that wasn’t working for me internally/emotionally.
Merge & Feedback
On what felt like a possibly bad knee-jerk reaction, I shut down all new profiles under Launch the Damn Thing, renamed the old Studio 1862 profiles, archived some—but not all—posts, cancelled my ShowIt & Shopify plans, and started a totally new website that would merge both products & services.
I kept the products for a while, but I had no idea what people wanted, how to sell it or market it, and I think I only ever sold one. 😬 Meanwhile, I kept getting client work and the services side of my business expanded within 1 year of quitting my job.
Since that merge, it's happily and contentedly been Launch the Damn Thing® ever since, becoming the most stable version of both my business & my brand.
And YOUR feedback? Amazing. Chef’s-kiss-awesome. 👌🏻🤩
With LTDT, I’ve found a sweet spot where I can relate to you, and you can relate to me. I have fun working in my business, and from what I can tell in all of your supportive comments, reviews, questions, and replies, throughout the last 4 years –– I’ve found my ‘home’ in this space. I know where I belong and where I’m able to serve YOU best by just being my damn self!
To the many unexpected compliments on my biz name—yeah, it was an accident, not brilliance. On choosing the new name, it just embodied my readiness to finally make a significant move, ––to be braver than I was, and to finally "Launch the Damn Thing®!”
If you’ve read this far, you are one of the many reasons why I’m still here writing these posts, making these videos, and creating content you love, so I can’t thank you enough for all of your support! I hope you know that it really does mean the world to me. 💛
Protecting What I’ve Built
Over time, it hit me—that I probably need to protect my business name because everyone loves it and we all know that copycats exist (whether they really are the greatest form of flattery, I’m still not convinced). So I chose to pursue an official trademark.
Why? Curious about how trademarking works? I'll break down my experience of that process in the next post.
––I know; I can feel your excitement practically BURSTING through the screen! 😆 But seriously, stay tuned.
And if you could give two shits &/or this isn't relevant for you, then hard feelings & find what is. As of posting, I've got over 50 other videos on my YT channel and 200+ blog posts to binge, so go for it! 😉
