The Value of Learning from Your First Clients

When you start your own project, it’s normal to go through moments of doubt, learning and even frustration.
We went through it at Canana.studio too — and we don’t regret it.
Beginnings are for experimenting, trying, making mistakes and understanding how we want to work.
One of the most common early mistakes is how you manage your first clients.

In our case, this looked like:
➡️ Accepting every single client suggestion, even when it didn’t make sense or went against professional criteria.
➡️ Not setting clear limits on the number of drafts or versions.
➡️ Failing to communicate extra time or costs when a project ran longer than expected.
➡️ Lowering prices to secure work, without valuing the effort and expertise involved.

Over time we understood those experiences were necessary. They helped us define our criteria, learn to say no, set boundaries and, above all, manage client relationships better.
Many professionals complain about the conditions at the start of their careers, but we prefer to see it as an essential learning phase.
Thanks to those early projects, today we work in a way that’s more solid, more conscious and more respectful — with clients and with ourselves.

Every mistake was a lesson.
Every client, an opportunity to grow.

We can only be grateful for the experiences that brought us here.