With .ME I wanted to emphasize I am a person, not a company. – Benny Aarup – Senior Full Stack UI Designer
We, at .ME Registry, wanted to understand how people perceive .ME domain name and how our customers use it. One of the first example websites we found is Aarup.ME and I got lucky to talk to its owner – Benny Aarup.
Benny is a Danish Senior Freelance Full Stack UI Designer, a member of the Forbes Tech Council and one of the first talents to be recruited into Toptal’s pool of admirable 3% freelance talents.
Benny chose .ME domain as he wanted to emphasize that he is a person and not a company. He believes that the .ME domain name is a clear indicator that this is a personal website. The best part about it is that he can have a name@surname.me email address.
Benny’s friendliness and positive attitude are what made this interview easy and fun. While gaining a deeper knowledge of the projects he is working on, I managed to understand him and his abilities better, as he can obviously choose and do projects that align with his values and ethics.
While working as a Business Development Analyst with Denmark’s leading IT and software company KMD, with more than 3000 employees and a close to 1bn USD annual revenue, Benny realized that his innovative skills and comprehensive toolbox could be applied for a greater good.
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As a Full Stack UI Designer, Benny engages early in the process of developing intuitive software, spanning across UX, UI, Interaction design, and Front End Development.
He travels around the world as a consultant working on different projects on-site as Beijing, Dubai, and Copenhagen and in distributed teams. The Toptal network, personal referrals and a well-networked Linkedin account with more than 3.8K contacts have driven his career path to work with high-end brands as, MasterCard, DFJ and Philippe Starck – just to mention a few.
In his latest project, Benny has been headhunted to work on the FOLIO.org project for Samhæng a UX, UI and Interaction design company working globally from Copenhagen, Denmark. The FOLIO.org project is an open source library services platform (LSP) designed for innovation by transforming library technology.
Understanding your customers and talking directly to them is of highest importance for your business. Earlier, I mentioned I was lucky, and that’s because, during the interview, Benny shared key UX insights with me – applicable to managing marketing for .ME.
Managing marketing means focusing on strategical approach, delegating different projects to different people, reporting to the owners, working with overwhelming numbers, charts, and keeping creativity under control. That way you lose important time that you have to spend with the actual user of the product you are offering. Benny gave me a perspective on what a .ME is all about and I’d like to thank him once again for his professionalism and ease of communication.
