How "Growth Hacking" Can Kickstart Your Freelance Business | With Ian Paget

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 212

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're an audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and if this is your first time joining us on the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you for listening. This show is all about, I guess, running a more profitable creative business without selling your soul. I guess that's a good way of saying it, without selling your soul, staying in integrity, keeping your morals high, your ethics high, and also your big account high. There's a way to balance all three of those. So that's the gist of the show. We talk to different people around the world who have specialized or done really well in something related to running a profitable creative business. And this is usually in the freelancing world. So if you're not a freelancer, that's okay, but most of this is catered towards freelancers.

So today's episode, we'll get into it in a second who we're interviewing today, what it's all about, but I've got to update you on what happened last week. If you listen to the show, my wife had a stomach virus. She was laid out for like three or four days. A lot of puking. It was not a good stomach virus. It was one that was like passed down from generation to generation, from like the tour life people down to people in like circles that we know to other people than to my wife and then to me eventually. If you weren't listening last week, I have a 25 plus year, maybe almost a 30 year streak of not puking, which is like really weird freakish thing that I'm weirdly proud of.

And I was being tested heavily. So good news on that front, I did get the virus, whatever I got from my wife over the weekend, I got through it, I didn't puke. So everyone that got it puked, I didn't get it. I guess I still have this stomach of steel. So that's a wonderful little weird brag that I have that I had to share with you people. And for all you new people, I'm so sorry.

I'm so, so sorry. We're not all about vomit here. Matter of fact, this is probably the only time we've brought up vomit on the show. So there you go. So let's get into the meat of this episode today. Today, we're talking to a wonderful designer based out of the UK named Ian Paget. And Ian has a cool business called Logo Geek. I will not give you 20 bucks if you get his niche figured out. Meaning, I know you know what it is because it's in the name. He's a logo designer.

I don't want to owe a bunch of people 20 bucks, which is why I'm not betting 20 bucks that you get to guess his niche. He's a logo designer. And he has a podcast called Logo Geek. He has a Twitter account. He has a Facebook community all around other logo geeks in the world can kind of fall along with what he's doing. And the reason I wanted to bring him on the show is because he has so much to share with us. He is a self-admitted geek.

He calls himself a logo geek. He's not a natural, like born speaker. He's not someone who is like a loud and proud, gregarious American personality, unlike some people.

And yet he still has a podcast. And he did it despite being so utterly terrified of public speaking that he couldn't even give a toast at like a party for friends and close relatives without his hands shaking uncontrollably where champagne would spill everywhere. Like that's how bad it was. So he went out of his comfort zone, launched a podcast. It was just an awful experience for him, according to this interview that you're about to hear. And yet it's still very successful. It's actually one of the more popular podcasts out there when it comes to the design world.

So the podcast has been huge for his growth as not only a freelancer, but just overall his creative business. And I think it's a really interesting story because of a few things. One is he does a really good job of taking something called imperfect action. He does not wait for all the green lights in his life before he does something. He does not wait to become the perfect person so that he can finally do the thing that he wants to do. He takes this really like good approach, I think a healthy approach towards these areas he may not be a natural in, areas he's scared of, areas that as creatives we might usually shy away from to get outside of his comfort zone. And he gets disproportionate results because of that, especially compared to other creatives who constantly hide from the things that we're scared of. So a few things that we talk about, obviously launching the podcast, the struggles around that, even admits to himself that it's not even the best podcast for his business because his podcast actually targets other designers, whereas his design clients are business owners, which is interesting, but it still works for getting him clients.