Let Go and Haul: my startup brand strategy guide (link), art book fair takeaways
Week 38, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Agh it’s nearly the end of Q3! I wish we were further along on certain things but then, but I’m also telling myself this is the natural state of startup life and getting anxious about it is unhelpful. Like the name of this newsletter says, I’m always learning to let go of new things (and haul even more ass). I was talking about this with my friend Matt Hackett a few weeks ago, and his words of wisdom were that it’s really hard to measure week on week progress with inventing products because some weeks it feels like nothing happens and then all of a sudden in a few days everything happens.
This week the NYU Future Labs Catalyst program ended with a demo day, and we got officially invited to the Next Round program which means we get to keep leveraging NYU resources! Thanks NYU!
I kicked off some internal branding exercises with the team on Friday, and I’m sharing these materials! This is an amalgam of the best branding tools I’ve collected over the years that I put together for a workshop last summer. Much of this comes from my days working with Amanda Lasnik (who is the most badass at this kind of quick and dirty branding). If you think you’ll happen to find yourself working in a startup with no brand strategy and you’re like shit where do I start, just bookmark this badboy for later.
Journal: what I learned
Yesterday I dropped by the NY Art Book Fair with Anton. It was a good reminder how powerful just getting out of the office is for ideas, and while I often talk product or do meetings with team members walking around Dumbo, hanging out in a visually stimulating place is always pretty good for my brain and I need to remember to do this more often.
My quick impression of the Art Book Fair this year: having been the last 4 years, it feels less and less surprising every year I go. I can’t tell if this is because there is genuinely less surprising stuff being exhibited or if I’m just that much closer to the New York design scene that it’s harder to surprise me. It’s always hot as hell and sticky and full of people but I guess this is part of the Total New York Experience. Why would you want AC in September? I used to love the LA one (which unfortunately isn’t happening anymore). I loved it not just for the much nicer exhibition space, but also it would always feel much more… surprising. The NYC one feels like a design juice concentrate of what is happening now/about to happen. The LA one used to feel like there were more surprising and unusual things to uncover. Genuine new-ness. Maybe this is because LA is having it’s art moment, or maybe it’s because people tend to be less in each other’s space there, or maybe it’s simply because I don’t live in LA and I’m less attuned to what is happening.
Anyway, the biggest trend that we picked out is this sort of attraction to surfaces that look and feel malleable. Shiny, soft objects, pools of liquid. Reflection, changing surfaces. Images like this:
Jams: what I’m into
How about this new track from Objekt?
If you haven’t realized that we are deep in the retro trend of VHS videos and instant camera pictures, then an entire music video edited together with that 90s feel says it all. Girls. The genre of Norwegian songwriter Girl In Red’s music is not really my vibe though I deeply appreciate the sentiment of the song :)