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I believe in 5 years most designers won’t approach creating a brand the way they do now, and for good reason…

Creating a logo and all of the associated branding material requires a lot of experimenting.

Experimenting requires repetition and repetition wastes time.

As a brand designer myself, I wanted to quickly preview variations of a logo, typefaces, colors, and patterns all together on a variety of collateral items. I also wanted a way to then easily output these assets in ready-to-use formats that didn’t require hours of production work.

These tasks are tedious and could very easily be driven by software…not endless clicks of my mouse.

This is why we built Emblem.

Emblem was created to not only help non-designer types get started on thei...

Most of us Founders have never raised capital, so when we dig in for the first time, we're mostly guessing at how the game is played. And friends — it is indeed a game. The problem with this game is that as Founders, the odds are stacked way against us.

We actually make matters worse when we don't understand the rules, and instead revert back to our base instincts, which range from carpet bombing the investor with follow-ups to trying to translate "I think it's interesting" into 50 potential meanings, like a 16-year-old after their first date.

What we need is to be able to read the signals for what they are, and when we do, take our foot off the pedal if the signal says "stop" and jam the pedal when the signal is "yes."

Anything that's not ...

As startups — unless you’re VC-funded — we don’t usually have the big marketing budgets that established companies have. We may not be able to drop thousands on a single ad campaign. But the good news is that we don’t have to. We have strengths we can tap into that can power our marketing and help us land customers.

One of those strengths is our ability to wow customers in ways that the big guys — with their bloated infrastructure and slow-moving cogs — just can’t.

Startups can use customer stories to illustrate how their products and services solve problems and make life wonderful, motivating potential customers to move forward in the buying journey.

How Customers Stories Boost Marketing

Customer stories, or case studies, can be used thro...

Sometimes a vacation isn't enough — we need a hard reset.

The game we play as Founders has massive costs to our emotional, mental and physical well-being, so thinking we can replenish all of what's lost in a "sweet trip to Mexico" is almost certainly not going to do the trick. What we need is a full life reset — we need a sabbatical.

We almost never hear the term "sabbatical" mentioned in any part of the startup universe and there's a good reason — we're way too needed at our startup! et it's that very notion that prevents us from ever replenishing our reserves, which are the very thing we need to effectively build our startup.

What Does a Startup Sabbatical Look Like?

Our sabbaticals don't have to be a ridiculous amount of time off — they ...

"Did you hear about the Founder who sold their startup and 'only' made a million dollars?!"

Ah, the popular refrain of startup haters everywhere when they gleefully recount the supposedly "shitty" outcomes of hard-working Founders. They get almost giddy with speculation. Nothing excites the people who don't start companies more than trying to belittle the outcomes of those that do.

Well, startup haters, this one is for you. This is a not-so-subtle reminder that not only do your opinions not matter — at all — but how wrong your position is, to begin with.

"What Startup did You Sell Again?"

Before we even dig into how wrong their analysis even is, and it's almost always wrong, let's begin with who is even making this analysis. 99% of the tim...

There's a weird discussion around Founder compensation, especially when the number is a big fat zero. We read about famous Founders from Google, Facebook, and Tesla taking $1 salaries, while earning millions in stock.

For early-stage Founders, we often can't get paid (so it's not much of choice!) but there's also this presumption that if we're forgoing personal compensation to roll all the profits back into the company, then we must be really committed.

It Buys Us Nothing

There's no argument out there that Founders shouldn't be paid, so taking compensation to zero is just a silly move.

The only time Founders or execs get the stink eye is when they take inordinate salaries compared to the rest of the staff or relative to the stage of the ...

“Micro-aggressions are the biggest barrier. They add up until people feel completely hopeless about ever being included.”

– Michelle Glauser, Founder and CEO of Techtonica

Under the big tent of Startups Live, it’s easy to forget that not everyone feels equally welcome at the startup table. Issues of diversity and inclusion – gender inequality being a big one – are real and pervasive.

But, if the movement to address such issues is going to gain traction and unleash widespread transformation, there is no better space for it to happen than here. Today, our featured guest and the movement’s conductor is Michelle Glauser, the Founder + CEO of Techtonica.

“Do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself before we get started?” invited mo...

On a first foray into crowdfunding, a founder might find that things are more complicated than they thought at first. What are the best practices? What type of crowdfunding should they do? Which of the many, many sites should they go with? It becomes clear very quickly that while they might be experts in their fields, they’re certainly not crowdfunding experts.

There are plenty of perspectives out there on what to do and what not to do; plenty of crowdfunding experts who are offering their advice to new entrepreneurs. (If we’re being honest, there are probably too many.)

The same issue comes up: How do you know who to trust?

So a good plan when tackling a crowdfunding campaign is to ask the experts. From other entrepreneurs who have been t...

People are hardwired to value transparency. From an evolutionary perspective, transparency has always been essential for survival. Our safety has depended upon determining whether other humans are trustworthy. Complementing this need to understand is the psychological desire to understand and be understood. Transparency is an integral part of the need for belonging, which Maslow ranked next to safety in importance.

When you first meet someone, there’s little transparency, and little trust. Over time, as your new friend shares experiences, opinions, and insights, transparency — and trust — increase.

We, as humans, like transparency. And not just in friendships. Transparency makes business sense because we like companies and brands that are ...

James Wolf was late for our interview — two and a half hours late, to be exact. I’d speed walked the fifteen minutes from my apartment to his shop in Ho Chi Minh City’s expat hub, Thao Dien, at 8:30 in the morning, only to be met with a shuttered door and no signs of life inside. Sweating in the shade as loitering taxi drivers threw me curious looks, I called him up.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, picking up after a couple of rings. “I didn’t expect to have to go to the factory this morning but something came up and I’m just arriving, on my bike. Can I call you in a couple of hours when I’m headed back to Thao Dien?”

“Oh no problem!” I said. “It’s my bad! I should have sent a follow-up email.”

Now, anyone who knows me knows that that’s not my us...