I want to share something I've been sitting with after the last few weeks.

I've spoken to 243 designers in the last month.

Not a course. Not a webinar. Real one-on-one conversations, most of them on LinkedIn.

(Yes, i read and reply to every single one of them. If you're one of them, hello!)

And when I asked almost all of them whether anyone was helping them with their search, I got the same answer.

"I've been figuring it out solo."

Then almost every single one of them followed it up with something like this.

"Things haven't really been moving."

I don't think that's a coincidence.

Going solo feels like the right thing to do.

You research. You find the templates. You buy the courses on Maven. You watch the LinkedIn career posts. You ask ChatGPT. You get feedback from friends or ex-colleagues.

And you try things.

And nothing changes.

Here's what I've noticed is actually missing.

It's not more information.

The templates everyone is using came from the same internet. They worked five or six years ago when outreach was novel. When getting a personalised-feeling message from a stranger in your inbox was actually rare.

Now everyone sends the same thing. Or some version of a ChatGPT message that any senior hiring manager can spot in the first line.

What actually builds trust with a hiring manager is a message that sounds like a specific human who understands their world wrote it specifically for them.

You can't reverse-engineer that from a YouTube video.

And here's the deeper problem.

Going solo means you have no mirror.

You can't see your own blind spots. You don't have someone pushing you through the decision points. Nobody is holding you accountable when the fear of reaching out stops you from sending the message.

Andreas had been in design for over 20 years.

Strong work. Excellent reputation in his space. But almost no LinkedIn presence, no outreach habit, and a genuine fear of reaching out to people he didn't know.

He felt he would come across as pushy. That people wouldn't want to hear from him. That his network wasn't the right size or shape.

After one session, I pushed him to start reaching out even before his portfolio was ready.

He sent messages to about 30 people in his target network.

First week: 35% response rate. Ten conversations with hiring managers and design leads at his dream companies.

He told me he was genuinely surprised people responded at all.

By week ten he had landed a role with a 35% pay increase.

That fear of reaching out is exactly what going solo does to you over time.

It lets the fear sit there unchallenged. It never gets tested. And so the search gets slower and slower.

There is also a financial cost that most designers don't calculate.

At senior level, your monthly income is somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand dollars, depending on your market and role.

Every month you go without landing is another month of that money not hitting your account.

If working with someone cuts your search by two months, the return on that investment is obvious.

But the maths are not why people stay solo.

They stay solo because they've been designing for 15 years and they feel like they should be able to figure this out on their own.

The market they're searching in is not the same market they searched in last time.

The playbook from five years ago does not work the same way anymore.

Solo is not humble. Solo is expensive.

If any of this landed, reply and tell me where you are in the search right now. I read every reply.

Joseph

P.S. If you want a quick read on where your search signal is breaking down, the free quiz is at careercreators.com. Takes about five minutes.