How Sarah Jutras is teaching the world how to work for themselves

Welcome to the Builders series, where we salute people who are making wonderful things in Notion. Read our last post, How Notion helped a college “tools guy” build a business serving 150+ clients.

Sarah Jutras’s career in tech was swiftly progressing. She had worked her way from junior UX designer to director of interaction design—before she turned thirty. But as she bounced from company to company, she found herself in a Goldilocks scenario: no company or role felt just right.

She struggled with startup hustle culture and demanding bosses who created toxic work environments. She loved being a designer, but questioned whether the corporate world was for her. So, she decided to make a change. In 2016, she quit her comfortable tech job to start working for herself. She hasn’t looked back.

Today, Sarah lives a double life. She runs her own product design studio, Huzzah Studio, which houses her client work with companies like Instacart and Imperfect Produce. But her real passion is teaching others how to make the leap into self-employment through a community she runs called Freelance for Life.

Since its launch in 2022, Freelance for Life has helped over one thousand professionals design their own freelance practices.

“I help people design work that works for them,” she says. “So it’s important for me to have a tool that allows me to do the same.”

As a product designer, Sarah has always been interested in tools both for their functionality and how they make her feel. She was drawn to Notion because it allowed her to design her workspace “in a way that works for my brain,” as she put it.

Like Sarah’s business, there are two parts to her Notion setup: one for her design studio and another for her course. For the design studio, Notion is the hub for all of her client relationships. She’s built a customer relationship manager, onboarding guides, and project boards to keep her freelance work organized.

For the course, Sarah has created a Business Kit with everything an aspiring freelancer might need to launch and run their own business. From finance tracking and business development to client experience and work-life balance, Sarah has a template for every aspect of running of freelance business.

Always ask yourself, “Who is my audience?”

“Design is a solution-oriented practice—that’s what differentiates it from art,” Sarah says. “So the first step is always asking whose problem you’re solving.” The way Sarah approaches design varies greatly depending on whether the audience is her clients, her students, or herself. The audience doesn’t just shape what she builds, but also how she chooses to present it. She might design the same page in a dozen different ways depending on who it’s for.

Have an experimental mindset

Before she moved by herself to the west coast in her early twenties, Sarah’s uncle gave her a piece of advice she’ll never forget: “Life is just a series of decisions,” he said. “You can always make another one.” This experimental mindset has served her well. Even though she’s almost a decade into her freelance journey, she still sees her business as an experiment. “The more we’re open to experimentation and play, the more we find the ways that work best for us in the moment,” she says.

Design your own team

One of the most common questions Sarah gets from her students is whether working for yourself is lonely. Sarah tries to remind them that entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be a solo sport. Even though she runs a business of one, she’s gone out of her way to build a community of fellow freelancers, collaborate with others with different skill sets, and learn in public. “I never found a sense of belonging in a traditional work environment,” she says. “But freelancing has allowed me to design on my own terms.”