Are you curious about how Justin Welsh, the successful solopreneur, amassed a following of over 600,000 on LinkedIn and 500,000 on X, and how he single-handedly generates nearly $10M in revenue?

That's what I am going to show you in this article by teaching you about design thinking and iterative design.

Design thinking and iterative design are fundamental processes in human life and can be used by anyone to become successful in any area of life or business.
It also works in relationships.

Unfortunately, 99% of humans jump straight into thinking they know the truth and what others want, which is always 100% inaccurate.

Let's dive in.

Your first solution is always wrong

When designing new applications, many businesses solve the wrong problem because:

• They never research to find the right problem to solve

• They don't test different solutions

• They don't investigate why things didn't work

• They don't retest new, improved designs of services or products

Of course, there is a simple solution to all of this to become successful with anything.

Here's how, step by step:

Iterative design is basic human learning

Iterative design is based on continuously learning from your mistakes as you test new things.

When you write articles you write about different topics to see what your audience likes and shares. Then you know what to double down on.

When creating an app, you fix bugs and check analytics to see which features are most frequently used so that you focus on developing those features and not the ones no one rarely uses.

Then you work on refining that service to increase the quality and reduce the cost of the service.

Why you should follow the design thinking process

People think that they will succeed immediately as solopreneurs or invent the new iPhone just by being creative and they all fail because they don't follow the design thinking process.

Design thinking is a dynamic, cyclical approach that teams or solopreneurs use to gain insights into user/customer needs, question preconceived notions, reframe challenges, and develop groundbreaking solutions through prototyping and testing.

This method is particularly effective for addressing ambiguous or unexplored issues and encompasses five steps:

1. Empathize - Research user needs

2. Define - What are the user needs and problems

3. Ideate - Create ideas and question them

4. Prototype - Start to create different solutions

5. Test - Test the different solutions against real users

Use the process to improve quality, strengthen relationships, and improve margins

By simply starting with empathizing with your:

• Customers

• Users

• Readers

• Stakeholders

• Managers

• Employees

• Lovers

Empathizing can never be accomplished without doing the research.

That means you always need to set aside enough time to research to be more on target with what problems you're trying to solve.

A common problem is that you try and solve the wrong problem. Since I am a business analyst I can share the analytical mantra that my profession follows to the letter every time.

We always ask "Why" five times.

Each time you question why something is an issue, you delve deeper to uncover the root cause, which might reveal a straightforward problem that the customer or user can resolve on their own at no cost.

You should only fix problems that they want to pay you to fix.

That's why any problem you want to fix should be:

• Desirable - meet people's needs

• Feasible - Be possible to solve

• Viable - Can you make money of it