#CreatorStories showcases the honest personal experiences of digital creators who monetize their knowledge of a skill and sell it on Selar.

We share these stories every week to inspire you to create and sell a product out of your wealth of knowledge and be a part of the digital creator economy.

This week, we turn the lights on Aderinsola Oluwafemi, a product designer and digital creator.

Let’s get to know her, shall we?

Can we meet Derin? 

Hi, my name is Aderinsola Oluwafemi, but you can call me Derin. I am currently a product designer at Eden Life. 

What was your career journey before becoming a product designer?

I used to be a Photographer. In high school, Photography was one of the trade subjects that I took and found really interesting. 

So I got a camera and took pictures of people and nature. Gradually, it became a hobby and then I became my family’s photographer for every event – such as birthday parties, naming ceremonies, and the likes.

Through this, I learned how to use Photoshop because I also had to design and print photo books of the pictures I took at these events. That’s how I learned how to design. But it wasn’t something that I thought I was going to get into professionally. It was just something I knew how to do when needed.

After a while, I stopped doing Photography and was pretty much just existing. I didn’t go to the University, so it wasn’t like I had school to be busy with. 

In 2019, I met somebody who is a very good designer and is super passionate about it. Before then, I never considered making design a full-time career. But he spoke about it passionately and it rubbed off on me so I decided to give it a shot since I was basically doing nothing else with my time. 

With his help, I learned how to be better at design. He taught me a bit about the basic principles of design. I also read and researched a lot. In my research, I read that you apparently need to have a niche to focus on because design is very broad. There’s motion design, product design, graphic design, illustration, and much more – so it made sense to just pick one, focus on it, and do it really well.  

I was already sort of doing graphic design but I wanted to try something new so I gave brand design a shot. Before I knew it as brand design, I knew it as logo design because I thought it just involved designing logos. Now I know better. 

I tried logo design, and I decided it wasn’t for me because I found it very complex. Of course, every niche of design is complex but it just didn’t feel right and I just stopped after a while. I found out about UI/UX design but I didn’t pay attention to it because it also sounded very complicated. 

While trying to learn more about design, I joined various group chats and communities. One of them was called “Ideators” and a few days after I joined, they had an “Introduction to UI/UX Design” class. 

I didn’t pay attention to the class, though (because, as I said earlier, I thought it sounded complicated). But it was a text-based class, so I decided to read through the messages a day or so after.

The man who taught the class broke it down in such a simple and easy way to understand. It didn’t seem as impossible and complicated as I thought it was going to be. It was literally just design – which I was already doing to an extent.  

A few months later, I decided to give it a try. I signed up for a daily UI challenge that sent UI design prompts to my email every day for 100 days. But, I didn’t do any of it until the 100 days had passed (laughs). 

Then, I woke up one random morning and just decided to give it a try. I didn’t have a laptop of my own then, so I used my mom’s laptop to get it done.

Instead of following the prompts I got to the later, I decided to go a bit extra with it. For example, the first prompt was to design a signup screen but after doing that, I went ahead to design a few screens for a travel app. I created the logo, did a couple of screens, and just posted it on social media. 

It wasn’t always easy for me to post my designs on social media. But with this one, I felt very proud of it and posted it online. I’ve literally been in design ever since. Something about it just felt right. That’s how my product design journey started.

How did you navigate the job market without a degree? Seeing as you now work as a product designer at Eden Life?

Eden was the second job I got, it wasn’t my first job. I don’t think I would have been able to get into Eden when I first started out. 

When I started trying my hand at product design, I wanted to be a freelancer. I thought that life was easy and it would work well, also considering I didn’t have any job experience before then. 

But after a while, I realized I would need to put some structures in place if I wanted to keep doing design. This is mostly because I get bored easily. I’ve done so many things in my life. From baking to jewelry making to music to writing, you name it. But the common thing with all of them is that I don’t do any of them for more than a couple of months. 

In fact, photography was the longest hobby I ever stayed at, apart from design now. Knowing myself, I started looking for a job and I honestly wasn’t prepared for the ups and downs of job hunting. I went on Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn and basically all the roles I saw required people with at least two years of working experience. I didn’t have that. 

As if that wasn’t enough, these companies were also looking for people with degrees in either Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or something else. And I also didn’t have that. 

So obviously, this didn’t work for me. 

One day, I saw an opening in a company (it’s a really popular Fintech company) and I applied. I had only my Dribbble portfolio and a couple of personal projects I had worked on at the time.

I got an email from them saying they were impressed with my work (which I found very confusing and surprising, I’m not gonna lie) and they wanted to move me to the next stage. 

I was very excited. 

But I didn’t hear back from them after a while. I was confused because they said they wanted to move me to the next stage. So what was the next stage? I sent a follow-up email and then they asked for my CV. At that point, I knew they had rethought whatever they thought initially before sending me that email. 

Nonetheless, I spent the whole weekend working on a CV without any job experience or university experience. It was going to be an empty CV but I got the idea from somebody, who worked at the company, to talk about myself and my core competencies. He also advised me to add my portfolio to the CV so it’s basically a CV(folio). I sent it and to date, I haven’t heard back from them.

I realized that nobody was going to want to hire me because I don’t have university experience or work experience. So I decided to look for internships, whether paid or unpaid. There weren’t many internships on Google, so I put it out on Twitter and a couple of the group chats I was part of and told people I was looking for internship opportunities. 

Eventually, I was recommended for an internship role at a design agency. But after the whole application and interviewing process, I was brought in as a full-time product designer instead of a UI/UX design intern. That was how I got my first job. 

On getting my job at Eden: I worked at the design agency for almost a year, and one day, a friend – Oke – sent me the opening at Eden and told me to apply. When I read the JD, I didn’t think I was qualified for what they needed, so I didn’t apply. 

A couple of months later, a designer that used to work at Flutterwave, whom I looked up to but had never spoken to before that day, entered my DM and told me about the Eden role and how she wanted to recommend me. 

To this day, I’m still shocked. I don’t know why she did that because we’d never had any conversation before that day. I didn’t even know she knew I existed. But I agreed and had the interview.

I thought it was going well but at the end of it, my now design lead told me I wasn’t what they were looking for. In his words “I was still a baby.” and they were looking for someone more mid-level to senior. This was around September/October 2020. 

He told me they would be hiring for more junior roles in January 2021, and that I should apply then. He was also very open and told me I could always reach out if I had any challenges with design generally.

A couple of months later, he reached out to me and said they had given it another thought and had decided to bring me on board.

His reason was that he believes that given the right work environment, I would be able to grow pretty fast to the level they were initially hiring for. I thought about it for a while and eventually accepted the offer. I joined Eden and I’ve been there for over two years now. 

Do you think being part of a community fosters career growth? if yes, how so?

Yes, definitely. I got lots of opportunities by just being in a community. Whether I got the job or not is another conversation. But by just being in those communities, I had access to those opportunities. 

Also, I grew faster professionally because of the community of people I had built around me. I had reached out to all the designers I looked up to regardless of their level and basically made them my mentors. At the time, I didn’t have shame at all (laughs).

A couple of them became my friends and if I had questions, I could always ask them. The people that played a huge role in my design growth are Daniel Abayomi, Mudia Imasuen, Aanu Sebiomo, Chukwuka Ezeoke, Praise Philemon, and Oke Obi-Enadhuze.

I created a group chat for all of us and if I had any questions, I would always ask. They not only answered but also broke it down in ways it was easy to understand. 

Daniel used to do this thing where anytime he learned something new, he’d call me and teach it to me, which was his way of solidifying his own knowledge but then he was also passing across new information to me.

I may not remember the names or the specific terms he told me that day but there are principles of design and UX that I unconsciously apply to my work because I learned them from him first. 

So yeah, joining a community helped me upskill. Community is also a huge reason why I have grown faster than I would have without a community when I started.

What inspired you to create the Life Dashboard on Notion and other digital products you have on Selar?

I have been using my Life Dashboard in Notion for about two years now. I didn’t create it to put it up for sale. I started using Notion mostly because of work, and then I saw how beneficial it was so I decided to adopt it for my personal life.

The first thing I created in Notion was a finance tracker that helps me track my budget and expenses. Before then, I had tried many budgeting apps but they didn’t work how I needed them to – which is why I went ahead to make one tailored to my needs in Notion. 

Basically everything about my personal life, I keep track of it in Notion. 

I also use it to plan hangouts with my friends. I have a group called the “Social Club” and I use Notion to create a schedule of the hangouts that I have planned for us during the year – whether game nights, movie hangouts, lunch, etc.

And after the event, I put the Google photo links on the Notion page too. So you can easily track how many hangouts we’ve had in a year, where it was, when it was, and see the photos we took. It’s helped me to organize things a lot better. 

Last December, I decided to reorganize my Notion Dashboard and be more intentional about every area of my life, from work to family to my relationship and friendships, etc. I posted a screenshot of my Notion page on Twitter and mentioned that I was reorganizing it to be more intentional with my life.

A lot of people reached out to me asking if they could get the template. I was reluctant to make it public at first because it was personal to me. But I later decided to share it because it would help the people who wanted it. I converted it into a template, and put it up for sale and lots of people have purchased it since then. 

What’s the average amount you’ve made from it?

I was tracking the sales for the first couple of days, but I stopped around the fifth day or so.  But as of now, I’d estimate about 600k – it could be more or less.

Do you have plans of getting a degree? or is this tech life really it?

Right now, I’m fine with where I’m at. 

We see you also sell presets, tell us about that.

While I may not officially do photography anymore, I still love taking pictures. I take pictures of people, flowers, food, and any other thing that looks interesting. And I also like pictures taken of me as well.

I edit them to make them look better. Color grading is one of my favorite things to do and I love that I can do it on my phone without exporting pictures to my laptop. So, I just edit my pictures in the Lightroom Mobile app and post them. 

People kept asking how I edit my pictures or if I have presets for sale. Just like the template, I was reluctant to make my presets public because I felt they were personal. I created them for myself, not necessarily to share with other people. But later on, I figured that I could monetize them. So I put them up for sale on Selar.  

What is your advice to people who want to get into Tech?

I would say be open to putting in the work and learning. By the way, I can only give advice based on my journey and things that I have noticed since then. 

One thing I’ve seen that holds people back is that they tend to put a lot of their journey into the hands of other people. By this, I mean that they depend a lot on having mentors and having people put them through. 

I know this may sound contradictory, considering my story about my journey earlier. But the point is, even with a supportive community, you’d still have put in the work to learn and grow yourself. 

So yeah, my advice would be to put in the work. Be willing to do what you have to do to learn, grow, and don’t forget to pace yourself. Don’t compare yourself to other people you see on social media. You don’t know how long that person has been in his/her craft. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Also, figure out how you learn best and don’t try to force somebody else’s method into your own. Some people love taking courses or watching videos, but I don’t. I’d rather read articles and blogs and other interactive things. 

Also, be willing to wait things out and have patience. You may not always get opportunities as fast as you want to get them, but you have to be willing to just wait it out and continue putting in the work while you are waiting for them. 

For a beginner product designer, I would say focus on thinking end-to-end. This means thinking of the actual process involved before you go to Figma to design. Think like you are designing for a purpose. Don’t just design things because you think it’ll be cool. Think like you are designing to solve a problem – because you are. 

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to say too much (laughs).

What advice would you give to other creators inspired by you?

Be prepared. Don’t just sit around waiting for something to happen. You miss out on opportunities you don’t prepare for. So while waiting for that job, build your portfolio. While you may not get actual jobs and projects to work on because you don’t have the experience, you can build yourself by working on personal projects.