I think this will be my first piece to fully introduce myself. I've been in the industry for a while now, but I never felt bold enough to establish one thing: my own damn company.
A little bit of backstory. I started my career as a UI/UX designer back in 2021. Not that long, but I genuinely enjoy everything and try to learn whatever builds up around it. I see someone editing video, I learn it, go deep in Premiere Pro for a few weeks, just because I'm that curious. I always had this kind of beef with engineers because they'd always change my design or some tiny micro animation, citing technical reasons I had no idea about. So I was like, fine, I'll do it myself. And I started to code.
When I worked with a DTC brand for over a year, I felt so many gaps, so many things missing. So I started my UX enterprise product specialisation. After moving on from DTC because it didn't feel like my calling yet, I worked with an education x cultural x mental health foundation, very contemplative, rich in structure and information, but sitting on a huge SEO problem despite having decent authority. It hurt me. So I started learning about SEO and everything in between.
I keep filling the gap. I keep learning. I keep doing many things at the same time. Freelancer energy, they say, even when I was employed by one company. But the urge to see something that can be done better, with nobody doing anything about it, always makes me feel like: fine, I'll do it myself. Not for the clout or the praise. It genuinely delights me.
People say you can't be a hero and fix world problems. But how about we start by being the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man first, before becoming an Avenger?
That's roughly where I've been for the past two years.
Still very junior compared to a lot of cool agencies and studios out there, niche-hopping from one thing to another. But I finally found where I belong. Turns out I love working with and helping educators. Not only because I keep learning new things with every project, but it's challenging enough to keep me genuinely invested. Do you know how many times I have to fact-check just to make sure one blurb on a website or a social post isn't misleading anyone? That level of care is exactly what keeps me trying to be better and putting everything I have into this field.
Because of all the workplace-hopping and niche-hopping, which I genuinely count as a win, I picked up a lot. The dos and don'ts. What makes things work. What makes people unhappy. Working with a client in the contemplative psychology education space, specifically, changed something in me. I started absorbing everything and rethinking what my role even was. The UX grounding I thought I had? A lot of it was limited. The things I was missing weren't in any UX or product management textbook. I found them in anthropology and studies on how people learn.
That shifted everything. Understanding the human behind the screen, not just balancing user needs against business goals, that's what actually levels you up. It's a long path to get there, with too many books to read along the way. But what I realised is I want to take the annoying, boring, invisible parts off other businesses' plates so they don't have to deal with them. Because funny enough, the parts that exhaust most people are exactly the parts I get hyperfixated on.
Money is part of it, of course. That's why we build businesses. But the sparks, the joy of it for me personally, that's a whole other thing.
And one specific moment made all of that real.
Not for clout, but I have to bring up Ahrefs Evolve 2026 here. Because honestly, it's the most origin-story thing that's happened to me, and it's the direct reason I now have a legal company.
I went out of curiosity, mainly to learn about proper SEO and everything around it. And it delivered. But while I was registering at the event, a thought hit me: do I put down the company I'm currently collaborating with, or do I make something of my own? I went with the latter. Made a fun little studio on the spot.
Then I had to name it. I wanted something that wasn't cringe, that actually made sense with what I do. I started listing out everything I work on and noticed I do almost everything. That's when I landed on Echo Studio. And no, the philosophy isn't about echo as in sound. It's from the Linux command echo *, which means print all. Because the list of things I do is basically all. I even put the asterisk in my logo as a nod to that origin, because it genuinely is where it came from. Then during the legal process, I found out the company name needed three words. So I added Omni. Turns out omni means do all. It wasn't planned, but it fit perfectly. Echo Omni Studio: print all, do all. The name kind of wrote itself.
With two weeks before the conference, I speed-ran my website build and got as much in order as I could. At the event, I met a lot of founders, and two people who became real mentors. Zwe from WhitePress, who helped me think through business development and how to approach international business properly. And Brian Ho from Horatos AI, who made it click for me that yes, this kind of thing is actually doable. Zwe especially kept showing up with insights and genuinely cheering me on.
If you're reading this thinking, "this person is a baby, she even needed a mentor, why would I trust her with my business?" Here's the thing. When you do work for someone else, you give everything. When you do it for yourself, it's genuinely hard to. That's why I have mentors. And that's probably why you might need me. That's how humans work.
With the name sorted and the confidence topped up, I still had one thing left: making it actually legal.
I started looking into how to make myself a legal entity. I didn't have a grand reason at the time. I just wanted something established enough to collaborate with bigger brands and names. Something that was fully, unambiguously me, not embedded in anyone else's shadow. Something real that I built from zero.
After some digging, I found a legal team who could walk me through the process. And it's no joke. All the requirements made me feel like: okay, this is real adulting. I didn't even have a tax number. Getting one, in a country where everything is supposed to happen online but the apps and websites are constantly buggy and erroring out, as a developer who could immediately tell the system was seriously half-baked, felt genuinely depressing.
After a few days wrangling with that, another problem: the legal team was slow, and the communication made me want to cry every single time. I told them, please email me, I don't like WhatsApp. They WhatsApp'd me anyway with a bajillion PDFs to review. Hello?? To be fair, they were actually good at their job. It's just that some people find WhatsApp easier, and I very much do not. I live on my PC.
Anyway. I thought after all of that, it was finally done. It was not, darling. I needed a corporate bank account. And that was a whole other saga. I had to go in person and sign 30 documents for one single account.
Now after all of that, everything is set up. New problem: I need more clients! But that's okay. I'm not writing this as a success story. It's a whole process, and through it I've learnt that you really need to yolo it. Try even when you're scared. Keep thinking about what's next, what to build, run through the possibilities and the exit plans. You're basically not allowed to stop, which sounds exhausting, but once things settle, you keep going. Because that's just what it is.
I started this with a tiny amount of knowledge and I'm still learning how everything works. But I took the risk upfront. I don't know exactly how it'll go. The one thing I know is that I'll make it, no matter what.
Because my teacher, Dr. Miles Neale, once said:
Reality is what your mind is projecting.
