My new venture studio — #5

Hey good looking 👋,

Well, that’s another month done and dusted!

First off, I apologize for the 2-day delay, I had a jam packed Father’s Day weekend 🙏

Anyways, waddup?

You should know by now in Mizko’s world, no month goes by without a major drop 😉

Today I’m quietly revealing my new venture studio to you…

🖱️ More Cursors 

🤫 The official launch is scheduled for later this month.

This is a special revealing for my dedicated subbies 🫶

So… what is this all about?

Over the last 3-4 years I’ve spent all my time in the education space.

Teaching and coaching over 13,000+ designers.

I’m super grateful and happy about that.

Meeting designers from all walks in life; from freelancers to in-house designers at Meta, Google, Amazon and even Microsoft.

However this year, I noticed something was missing.

After spending a day at a cafe, journalling and dialling into how I feel, I learnt something.

💛 I miss product.

It’s my jam.

I have been a product guy most of my life and I miss it.

Over the last 3-4 years, majority of my day-to-day work has been filming videos and courses.

This left an empty void and itch in me.

So… what’s the plan moving forward?

More Cursors will be my way of easing back into some product work with my team. It will be the ‘home’ to where we will incubate our own products and also help very limited clients achieve their product success.

Giving myself (and my team) the opportunity to continue doing what we love.

It means I’ll have the motivation to keep pushing ahead.

I’ll also be able to continue teaching real-world, practical product design and strategic lessons, because we’ll have real case studies to talk about — just like this one with over 45,000 views!

We recently helped one of our SaaS clients 2x-3x their activation and expansion rates — which equates to a lot more 💸💸💸. Woop to team work!

If you need some real results hit me up.

My team and I are currently working on incubating one of our own products, and I’m also in the prospecting stage with another business (over 1.6k employees) on helping them strategize and design an entirely new product.

More Cursors hasn’t officially launched but we’re already building a waitlist!

In conclusion, I’m finally taking action and scratching my itch.

I really miss sinking my teeth into some product stuff.

That’s it for this month!

Bite sized learning

1. 🧘🏻 Re-evaluate yourself: Every day you live is a new lesson, continuously molding your principles and viewpoints. ↳💡 Learning: As I spend more time journalling and evaluating myself this year, I have come to realise, my perspectives and values have shifted dramatically. It wasn’t clear to me at first, because I just felt conflicted in specific situations. Here are the themes I used to help me structure my thoughts, ‘Problem(s), Feeling(s), Result(s), Solution(s) and Alignment(s)’. If you’re interested in learning how I mapped these out, let me know in the comments or reply to this email. If there’s enough demand, I can provide more context.

2. 💸 Start investing yesterday: With an annualised avg return on my 5-10% net worth, my lifestyle is covered.  ↳💡 Learning: In 2013 I made my first ever investment into a Sydney apartment. Fast forward to today, my entire portfolio (net) of real estate properties and equities can cover my lifestyle at an annualised avg return of 5-10% per annum. This has given me the freedom to choose what I want to work on. The key lesson here is that, it has taken me 10 extremely-hard-working years to get to this point. If you want the freedom, start investing yesterday. Every dollar you make should be working as hard as you do. In retrospect, I wish I started earlier.

3. 📊 Pay vs Learning opportunities: You can’t negotiate with empty hands.↳💡 Learning: In one of my recent LinkedIn posts, I shared my personal experiences when it comes to Pay vs Learning opportunities. “They don’t pay much.” is a very common response from juniors and intermediates, but if that’s you, you’ve already lost. Take a quick read to why I prioritise learning over pay.

How can I help you?

Here are a few ways I can help you crush your career goals (just like me):

💼 Build confidence in end-to-end UX/UI design (10 hours) - You’ve mastered the tool and UX research and now you want to learn how to lead, design and manage a project end-to-end. Dive deep into every little step alongside me with a real-world project.(300+ designers — New course ✨)

🖥️ Master Figma (10 hours) - Become an expert in Figma so you can get more done; faster and better. This isn’t just a technical course about features, it’s an end-to-end course on how Figma fits into a real-world project.(7,600+ designers)

🔍 Dive-deep into UX Research & Strategy (10 hours) - Learn how to run UX and business research to make more strategic and data-informed decisions for larger scaled projects and improved stakeholder management.(800+ designers)

⚡️Design 10X faster with 8,000+ pre-designed components - We just launched v.2.7.1. If you’re starting every project from scratch, you’re probably wasting a lot of time. Leverage Shipfaster UI to speed up your process dramatically.(3,400+ designers)

That’s it for this month’s newsletter!

Let me know how you found this month’s edition; what did you love or dislike?

It means a lot to me.

Mizko