In this episode of "Finders to Builders," I sat down with two incredible content creators in the UX space: Nikki, a user researcher and founder, and Chris, a self-taught designer who runs UX Playbook. We discussed how they started creating content, their processes, and valuable tips for anyone looking to begin their content creation journey.
Check out the full episode on Spotify:
Meet Our Guests
Nikki: "I'm Nikki. I am a user researcher and a founder. I guess now two as well. I do content and coaching on one side of my business or as its own business. And then my other business is still user research consultancy. So I do lots of research, but I'm only allowed to do research in Jersey, which is the channel islands. Yeah, it's a fun time having a visa. So I do a lot of research with financial institutions that don't really know what FinTech is. And on the side of things, I'm obsessed with Stephen King and write horror fiction that I one day hope will become a New York Times bestseller. That's like my dream. So like research, yeah, cool, but horror, really cool. That's me."
Chris: "I'm Chris, I run my creator business, UX Playbook and Backlog. UX Playbook is my attempt at UX education through playbooks, courses, and coaching. And Backlog is something different, it's my endeavor to help content creators build a better business. I'm a self-taught designer. I've been designing for 10 years and left the corporate world probably about four years ago. And stumbling into content creation and stuff like that during that time. So this is all an exploration in terms of business and content and what that means really to be solo."
Getting Started with Content Creation
Julian: How did you start or come up with the idea of creating content? Did you just one day say, "Okay, I'll start writing about this"?
Nikki: "Mine is slightly more selfish than 'Oh my gosh, I'd love to enrich the community' and more along the lines of 'Wow, these people keep asking me the same things.' Therefore, what I'm going to do is create articles. I'm a writer, so it was very natural to be writing as my platform. I was just going to create articles based on the frequently asked questions in user research. That's literally how I got into creating more longer-form content. Then I realized people don't just naturally discover my articles. So I decided instead of hoping that somebody would stumble upon my well-written beautiful article on recruitment and screener surveys, I decided to start posting on LinkedIn to share that content to a wider platform."
Chris: "My story is a little bit different. I left a really toxic job, like super mega toxic job. It was just before the pandemic was closing down the world. I couldn't leave Thailand at the time. So I was like, 'What do I do with all this time trapped in a country?' Well, everybody was trapped somewhere. So I decided to play around with video and that was my first medium of content creation. The first video I made was actually about me quitting my job. I didn't really lean in initially. It was more of a creative endeavor. When UX Playbook organically grew on its own, I was winding down a startup that I was co-founder of because we basically couldn't find product-market fit. My partner pushed me to create content to push this to a wider audience. We've been going for over a thousand days now in terms of publishing every single day."
Minimum Requirements to Get Started
Julian: What's the minimum requirement to get started for folks who are just beginning?
Chris: "You can just get started with your phone. No mic, no teleprompter, no lights. Literally your phone by a window would be fine. That's actually what I did. What I started was very different. I didn't have a microphone and I bought a cheap action camera for like a hundred bucks. No tripod, nothing. It was just me sat in front of a camera. I did a bunch of shots. I put the camera somewhere, I walk past and then picked up the camera later. No scripting. I just watched a lot of videos before I made my first video because I wanted a certain feel. I've always been fascinated with Casey Neistat's style. So that's the exact video style that I tried to emulate. Totally honest, you don't need anything. You just need your phone and everybody's got one."
Nikki: "I love that you reference something outside of our space as inspiration because it can sometimes be hard and you can get stuck a bit in a vacuum of 'Who are the other UX people that do this?' I've often found that the best inspiration comes from things that are vastly different from what we're doing. Like I'm obsessed with the podcast Heavyweight. Finding that inspiration from outside is so important. It doesn't have to be within our industries. And yeah, you don't need everything to get started. Just start."
Starting with Writing
Julian: How do you start with writing? Because a lot of people, including myself, get pretty intimidated by the blank page.
Nikki: "If writing isn't your jam, you don't have to write to create content, there's just so many ways to create it. But if you're wanting to push yourself into writing, the first thing that I would say is think about the one actionable thing you want somebody to take away from what you are writing. I utilize that goal of what I want somebody to take away to inform the rest of the article. And I never give myself a word limit, which is sometimes not good because I'm like, 'Great, I have like 5,000 words, that's way too many!' But I always start with that end goal in mind. So that way you're not starting with a blank page. You write the goal down, write what you want somebody to take away at the end of it. I don't outline anymore, but I just go ahead and say, 'Okay, how do I build up to that outcome?'"
Chris asked Nikki: "Do you spend more time writing or more time editing? And has that changed over time?"
Nikki: "Writing. I write final drafts. But keep in mind that I have been writing since I was like seven. I've been writing nonfiction user research-based content since 2017. I used to edit a lot more. What I tell people is overwrite and then cut rather than trying to write the perfect thing and then add stuff to it. But now I usually write a final take. Sometimes I'll go back and tweak here and there. But I try and aim for first draft is the last draft."
Benefits of Content Creation for Your Career
Julian: For people who may not be considering pursuing this as a side hustle or their main hustle, how can creating content affect someone's career? How can they benefit from creating content if they keep their 9-to-5 job?
Chris: "They can absolutely benefit from it. Not saying that everybody should, but I think you can. One of the ways that people will find you is if you shout loud, and how do you shout loud on the internet? You just share your work. You don't have to say 'I'm this thought leader, I could teach you X, Y, Z.' You could just be like, 'Look, this is what I learned' or 'Here's the thing I did' or 'Here's a mistake I made.' It can absolutely benefit your career - job opportunities, connecting with other designers in the world, or you could spin up your own little product if you wanted to. I think there are more positives than negatives, but we should probably speak about the negatives in terms of things like being hooked on vanity metrics. For folks interested in trying it, I'd say just create blindly. We started creating every single day just to get the reps in - it was nothing about quality, it was all quantity, because I didn't know what I didn't know."
Nikki: "I want to echo the sentiment that it's great if you would like to create content, but just get really clear on why you're doing it and what the point is. Creating content can actually help you a lot with organizing your thoughts and helping you understand things more deeply and from different perspectives. And I think that is a hugely beneficial thing to have for your career because as people in UX, that's a huge part of our jobs - to understand different perspectives and bring different perspectives and question ourselves. But the second that I started creating things for other purposes, like for selling things, for making money, for getting engagement, for getting leads... the second I go too far over that line, my posts suck. You can't let it impact you, but it's scary when it's your job and a means to making money. But if it's just something you're wanting to try, do it blindly. Do it for the fun that it is."
Julian: "I completely agree with what you both said. You need to bet on the long game. If you start creating content, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, it's not going to be an overnight success. If you write once a week, twice a week, five times a week, you don't need to think about this week, next week, or next month. You need to think about next year. Is this shaping my way of thinking? I create predominantly on LinkedIn. The format helps me distill my ideas in a very short format. It's all about the long game. Maybe your first couple of posts suck, but after one year of creating content, when you go back to it, you've cringed a bit. Most people online are not creating content but consuming content. So if you just get started, you would be part of the 1-2% of people putting stuff out there."
The Dark Side of Content Creation
Julian: What are the horror stories regarding content creation? What are the biggest challenges when creating content for you?
Nikki: "I've been stuck in a horrible place with creating content. When I get into creating content for the wrong reasons - I don't want to say like the wrong reasons, because I'm a business, so I have to sell things. But when I'm not really focused on sharing information or what my audience needs or empathizing with my audience, that's when I hit those horror stories of just being really stuck and not knowing how to create or what to create and being frustrated. Then of course all my posts are flopping, which just churns into that horrible cycle of 'This is the worst. I'm the worst. What am I even doing with my life?'"
Chris: "I think one for me, which a lot of people get, is where people are just toxic. They don't know how to have a productive debate and they're just assholes. They never think about how it affects the other person reading. I don't phase by that stuff anymore, but I can imagine if you're just starting out and someone comes across your content and they're just yelling at you, you could feel really bad. Social media doesn't really have nuance. You want to take a stand because that makes your point even more poignant, but folks don't get that. But the joke is actually on them because of the algorithm. That's why I don't get bothered about it anymore."
Julian: "Speaking of feeling the algorithm and negativity, sometimes you see this content on different platforms around fear-mongering or spreading negativity. That also feeds the algorithm. Sometimes you have to polarize if your ideas are strong enough, but you will face people creating content just to bash other people or to bash other ideas. That's pretty much the toxic side of all this."
Chris: "There's also unprecedented plagiarism. It's everywhere. I actually found someone early in my journey on LinkedIn and I was like, 'Wait, that's exactly what I wrote!' I messaged this person and it got taken down. The work that you put in can get taken credit for, and it could do better in terms of vanity metrics than what you do."
Nikki: "I've had people take my free work, copy it, and put it up for sale. But it's so hard, especially with things like the internet and LinkedIn. Everybody's going to take it. And unfortunately, some people will just take it as their own rather than crediting you. That used to really kill me. But now I'm always like, 'You know what? At the end of the day, this is what the internet is.' There needs to be some letting go of the control that we have because it's just impossible to control the internet and social media."
Charging for Content and Services
Julian: Nikki, why didn't you charge for your content in the first place?
Nikki: "Probably because I am a mix of things - as a female, I feel inherently like I should not be doing this. It's something that I talk to a lot of people about. There can be a lot of shaming around charging, like I see a lot of shaming around charging for mentorship. My mentorship looks really different than somebody who's on a mentorship platform having one-off calls. My mentorship means I'm in your back pocket. I respond to you immediately for six months straight and give you unlimited constant feedback on anything and everything you ask or submit. So the amount of time that I put into each mentee is hundreds of hours. I think I had a really hard time, and I still do, with figuring out what I should charge for, what I should leave as more open and free, and what that balance is."
Chris: "Maybe it's also a symptom of just internet culture in general. You pay for your internet line or phone bill, but then most of the time, especially with social media, it's all free. Only recently we've noticed that they're selling our data. But I also think there's a huge shift. Maybe it's just because I'm in a creator bubble, but everybody has something they're offering. And if you find it valuable, it's usually behind a paywall."
Julian: "You get that a lot - 'Why are you charging for mentorship while others are not?' But there are a lot of trade-offs there. Every hour I dedicate is not just the hour that we are together, but also all the hours that I give you support, or I talk to you, or I answer your emails. And then all the time that I'm investing there, I'm not investing elsewhere - in my business, my family, hobbies, or partner. The opportunity cost is that when you start thinking in those terms, you charge because you consider this as value for potentially someone's career. There's also the flip side that if you pay, you're also showing that you have skin in the game and you're committed."
Nikki: "Something else that I found interesting is like people have a hard time seeing me as a business or a service. I find it really hard for people to see me as like, 'Hey, I actually need to make a living from the things that I'm charging for. Like, literally, this is my job.' And I think people can sometimes have a hard time seeing that, maybe also with the fact that a lot of stuff is available for free.”
Three Tips for Those Starting With Content Creation
Julian: What are three tips you would give people who are starting out with content creation, whether it's video, LinkedIn, Instagram, writing, or whatever?
Chris:
"Get as many reps as possible. You're going to suck at first, so you have to push past the suck. If you can fight through it, it gets more fun because if you're good at something, that usually builds momentum."
"Imitate. Copy first, because that's usually easier, or take heavy inspiration, whether it's a certain video style, editing style, composition, or way a story is told. You can reverse engineer how they did it."
"Choose a medium that seems fun. Writing is probably the lowest barrier to entry because you don't need much gear. With video, you still need a phone, but with writing, hopefully you have pen and paper."
Nikki:
"Get really clear on your goals and why you are creating content. What's your brand voice? You don't have to have a brand, but what is the voice that you want to put out?"
"Don't be scared to use AI to get started. I use AI as a thought partner quite a lot to help me understand different topics or ideas. I ask ChatGPT what I'm missing from something or what perspectives I'm missing."
"Stay super authentic to what feels the best to you. If something is not feeling good, you don't have to continue doing it. If you want to change medium completely, do that. Be flexible with the things that feel the best for you."
I added my three tips:
"Be careful with AI. You don't want to end up with content with capital letters all over the place and rocket emojis."
"Ignore the naysayers. If they don't like your stuff, they can unfollow you, they can block you, they can go and cry on their own."
"Get started. The best time to get started was one year ago, two years ago. The second best time is now. If this is what you want to do, regardless of the medium you choose, just simply get started. Don't think too much about it, and you will get better on the way. Think of the long game."
Share this post