Taking Risk
If you’re not putting your balls on the table, what are you doing? Why even bother being an entrepreneur?

Iterations
We probably re-did the user experience for the signup process six or seven times before we got it to a very minimalistic two-step… You iterate and you cycle and you put it in front of people early and you test it as often as you can and use your metrics to see whether or not you’re on the right path.

Post Launch
After showing an about.me prototype at SXSW we took a long, hard look at the product and we realized we hated the version of it that we had built, where we had iterated it to. And in what was one of the craziest periods of the last year, we scrapped 90 percent of [the interface] and started over.  Just completely broke it down and built it back up again. We worked for six weeks and wound up with what we have now.

Communicating with Designers
Some people think of design as a utility or a commodity… We used to call it the “shut up and color” mindset. You can take that perspective in a hiring arrangement but I guarantee you, you are going to get crap work. And the reason your design will suck is not because you have a shitty designer, it will be because you’re not interacting with your designer in a way that gets the best possible work out of them.  It’s a collaboration. It’s not dictatorial at all.

Entrepreneurial designers
Five years ago the interaction designers were asking, “where’s our seat at the table?” Because in larger organizations, no one gave a shit.  No one was doing what was necessary to ensure that customer experience was king. Today, some people are talking about focusing on the customer experience like it just got invented. What’s been amazing is watching this transformation of people’s perspectives around how you can bring a product to the world.

A lot of people are amazed that you can be a designer and an entrepreneur. I read a post by some dude, who’s also a founder, who says in his experience that most designers don’t have an entrepreneurial mindset. Bullshit. Anybody who starts an agency, anybody who tries to build a product, anybody who sketches at home has an entrepreneurial instinct.

I became an entrepreneur by accident… I thought I was perfectly happy being a consultant. I didn’t realize how much I needed to bring something into the world… until I was given the opportunity. Now that I’ve done it, I’m religious about seeing things though. I want to mature about.me to the point where it represents the idea that I had, like a platonic ideal of the product I had in my head the first day I thought about it. Because I think it’s got that potential, and I won’t  be satisfied until I get it to that point.

Mike Matas was the cofounder of Push Pop Press and Delicious Monster. Push Pop Press created Al Gore’s book Our Choice and fundamentally changed the way people think about reading books. They were then acquired by Facebook where Mike currently works as a full time designer conceiving the future of a product that helps hundreds of millions of people communicate and connect with each other. Below are excerpts from our interview with Mike about how he became a designer entrepreneur and the lessons learned on his journey.

We’re a few days away from our Kickstarter deadline! Help make our nonprofit book and distribute it for free to students worldwide here.

An early start
I was 15 or 16 and found out that Omni Group was a few blocks from my house, so I sent them an email and basically asked for a job because I was interested in software and thought what they were doing was pretty cool. They gave me a job doing tech support, but I was pretty terrible at it, so a couple of weeks after I started they took me off of that, and I just started helping design the products… Actually, I was 15 because I remember when I turned 16 I was able to work more hours because of child labor laws.

Building a Platform
It started as let’s sort of piecemeal build an app for Al Gore and then move on. But the more we started looking at the problem, we realized that number one, lots of other people wanted to build books like this. Number two, it was impossible to build the kind of book we wanted to do without building a larger platform in order to build it. So we decided to build a company out of it that could provide a tool that would allow lots of people to build books.

Finding Inspiration
I like coming up with ideas and looking at things and thinking, “How can I make that better?” or “This is how it should be, why is it not like that?” And then figuring out how to bridge the gap between that. Like if you see a sci-fi movie with all these really cool user interfaces on computers, some of them are kind of crazy, but sometimes it’s like, wait, why don’t our computers actually work like that?

Designing for designers
There are certain things that designers like to design for other designers. Being in user interface design myself, it’s sort of its own world. Designers who are really into [their domains] have stronger views on the way stuff should work than the average person using stuff. So you need to balance your desire to create something really crazy and really amazing with the reality of the people who are going to be using your product.

Brace for the troughs
In both companies [that I started] we hit a point in the middle of development where morale was very low… It’s really important to know that is a part of the development process. At some point there’s a good chance you’re going to hate each other and have arguments and second guess what you’re doing and think that you should have done something else. It is so important to keep going and keep your eye on the prize of what you’re building.

Love for your product
You do need to be in it for the right reasons but even more you have to love [your product idea] on a deeper level because it’s a long term commitment. It’s easy to have days where you forget what the goal is that you set out to achieve. If you’re not working on something that you yourself really care about, it’s hard to stay motivated and passionate about doing your start up and getting it out there.

Daniel is a co-founder of Milk Inc, with Kevin Rose and Jeff Hodsdon. They’re building a small company that can execute on several startup ideas at once. Their first product is Oink, a social recommendation app. Previously, Daniel was the creative director at Digg and then the director of design at the gaming startup Tiny Speck. He’s also a less-active partner in the Canadian design agency silverorange, which he helped found in 1999. Below are a few excerpts from his interview.
Note: We’re a few days away from our Kickstarter deadline! Help make our nonprofit book and distribute it for free to students worldwide here.

The birth of a web designer
Back in highschool (in the early days of web design), some friends and I were all just dicking around on the computer. We were really literally just looking at what other people were doing on the Internet. Like, “Oh man, that looks really cool.” That stuff that Salon did in the early days. We were like, “Damn, I like that menu.” Then we would replicate it and do something similar to it, adding our own spin to the idea.

Beyond “just doing X”
In the early days of Digg, it was just maybe four or five of us and then there was quickly seven or eight of us. Kevin kept throwing out, “Okay, let’s do X.” I was used to doing client work where you normally just do ‘X’ unless you think that thing is a really dumb idea… So I actually asked him explicitly about this at one point, I still remember this, like, “How much do you want me to tell you when I see an opportunity or when I see what you’re doing could be much better?” And he was like, “Oh my god, please.”

Designers can see the big picture
As a startup grows, you get people more and more specific about roles, like “I’m head of marketing,” and “I’m head of revenue,” and people get myopic. They get blinders on. They only see their own thing, and they lose sight of the product. More and more, I was in a position where I could step up and say, “Here’s the big picture. This is how all these things fit together.”

Perfection is not the only goal
There’s a fine line between being a perfectionist and being a pragmatist. I saw a quote the other day about striving for perfection and I was like, “I don’t know if I agree with that.” I cut corners a little too much maybe sometimes, but at the same time I’ve seen some designers, I’ve had designers work for me, who spend way too much time polishing. I love pixel-perfection as much as the next designer, but there’s also value in getting your design out in front of people very quickly to judge its core qualities, which sometimes necessitates a faster, more pragmatic approach.

Starting Milk
My basic calculation for starting a new project, whether it was Digg or Tiny Speck or Milk, is what’s the worst that can happen? Seriously, it’s literally that question. “Will I make a bit of a salary?” Cool. “Am I hurting anybody by doing this?” No. “Is it doing some good?” Yes. “If this all blows up in two years, will I be able to still pay my rent?” Yeah.

Working with your friends
The reason I’ve been able to do some of the things that I’ve been able to do is making good friends who happen to do good things. I’m not saying that’s the only way to get somewhere. I’m sure you can hire teams and if you’re MBA, you can hire an engineer. But I think you do better by making friends, hanging out with people you want to work with.

Show me the work
No doubt, the number one thing I care about when I’m hiring any designer, especially a young designer, is I want to see work. And it’s got to be relevant work. You want to work in mobile stuff and you haven’t been hired to do any mobile stuff, build something, prototype something, do anything. It kills me these people, even in applying for a design internship, and they send me a bunch of posters and I’m like, “Do you want to build mobile stuff?” If they had such a strong interest in pursuing a certain thing, you’d think it wouldn’t require a job to do it.

The full interview will be published in the Designer Founders Book. Help us demystify the path for designers to build tech startups with positive social impact by backing our Designer Founders Book on Kickstarter before this Sunday, January 22nd!

Lessons learned in design school
We got the opportunity to constantly refine our skills, to use creative solutions to solve problems—as cliché as it sounds—to think outside the box. Really, what they mean is that the first solution you come up with is the obvious solution and typically not the best. You have to keep digging to get to the more complex solution, which means peeling back layers and that’s really what AirBNB was about. It was about taking a process that was very, very complex, the process of being able to stay with another person on a short-term basis, and just removing all the complexities.

Pitching investors
I remember some investors saying “you have a lack of a technical team” and of course we had Nate, but they were used to seeing multiple technical founders. I think investors were not seeing the whole picture: first, they were undervaluing design by saying that, but also they were not recognizing that when you build a marketplace, all the nontechnical challenges exist to build it. It’s one thing to technically build our web site—that’s the easy part. Get the marketplace going, get traction, and build a community—that’s the hard part.

Advice for students looking to launch a startup
I think what I’d recommend is just doing a startup as soon as you have a cofounder. If you don’t, I’d go work for a company that has lots of really smart and ambitious people. You’ll learn what it’s like to build a startup and you’d grow faster because you’ll know what it’s like to be in a startup. You’d also potentially meet your next cofounder doing this.

I started drawing when I was 5 years old. I’m only 29, but for 25 years I’ve practically spent every moment thinking about design. For the design undergrad: find a technical cofounder as passionate about engineering as you are about design.

Staying independent
I think we can become at least as big as eBay, and maybe even bigger. What I like to say is “if eBay can become a billion dollar company by monetizing stuff in their house, how big could a company be if the monetize the house?”

The full interview will be published in the Designer Founders Book. Help us demystify the path for designers to build tech startups with positive social impact by backing our Designer Founders Book on Kickstarter by January 22nd!

We’ll add to the interview gratefully adapted from Jared Tame – startupsopensourced.com

Note: We’re less than a week away from our Kickstarter deadline! Help make our nonprofit book and distribute it for free to students worldwide here.

Last week we interviewed Scott Belsky and Matias Corea, the founders of Behance and the 99% Conference, for the Designer Founders Book. Scott left his job at Goldman Sachs and Matias was freelancing as a print/identity designer when the two joined forces to create an online platform for creatives to showcase their work. With almost no funding they have built a profitable business with over a million users. Below are excerpts from their candid take on entrepreneurship, designer founders, and how to build a business that changes the world.

Outsourcing design/technology

Scott Belsky: If you outsource design, if you outsource technology, if you have all these different things being done by different people who don’t have respect in the company or aren’t being treated as founders, this stuff is all reflected in the DNA of the business. The DNA of our business is the result of the types of people that we brought in, the type of autonomy they had, the respect we had for each other.

Entrepreneurship

Scott Belsky: Entrepreneurship done right is a consistent humbling of what you don’t know and what you need help with.

Finding the right partner

Matias: What I found in Scott is he is intensely passionate. This energy. I don’t find this in many people. You could look at him and understand that he was going to do this, with you or without you. And then, I was like, “I want him.” Because I’m as crazy passionate about things I care about. If I was going to take on any risks, it needed to be with someone as passionate in life and in doing something as he was.

Embedding design from the start

Everything we’ve done, even the way that we’ve presented the business plan to our team and the way that we’ve done decks. Everything is as if we’re, I would say, like almost a design firm producing stuff, especially with brand and everything else.

The first project Matias and I worked together on as co-founders of this business was going over the logo for an entire week. He was training me on what Helvetica is, what kerning is, and how the typography is the seed of what we are going to build as a company, which was just mind-boggling to me.

Making mistakes

Scott: Another mistake we made is we were trying to be unique. Like, I remember we called creative fields “realms,” and we called groups “creative circles.” And when users get there, they’re like, “What the hell is a realm?” There’s a message of sometimes you should use a ubiquitous term and sometimes you should be un-original because it’s making people’s lives easier.

Go big or go home

Matias: starting a business, there’s no security. But you have to have the vision that you’re doing something big. And I think that is something that Scott and I share. We’ve been asked so many times, “So, what’s the exit strategy?” We haven’t even talked yet about exit strategy because we don’t have one. Exit strategy is making a massive business that changes the world. Or at least, part of it, and that’s not an exit.

The full interview will be published in the Designer Founders Book. Help us demystify the path for designers to build tech startups with positive social impact by backing our Designer Founders Book on Kickstarter by January 22nd!