Branding Masterclass for AI FoundersㅣSmith & Diction

Intro

00:00Copywriting is either the easiest job in the world or the hardest job in the world. So to me, the main difference between fine copy and good copy is what's the emotion. I think the biggest mistake that happens when you're creating brands is that sometimes people think it's like logo type color, but realistically there's so much more.

00:16I see a ton of ads, especially in the AI space, that are all about efficiency. And I just think it's ridiculous. You could stop a thousand people on the street and ask them what they want in life and no one is going to say, "I really wish I was more efficient."

00:28I am Mike Smith. I run uh Smith and Diction with my wife Cara in the beautiful Bach building in Philadelphia. Smith Andiction is a design studio. We mainly focus on creating thoughtful identities for imaginative clients. We work on companies like Perplexity, Gamma, Exposure, and Anterior.

00:47Just anything that feels really, really unique. I'm Cara Smith and I run Smith and Addiction with my husband Mike. I run most of the addiction side of what we do. So I oversee all of our STR brand strategy and messaging and copywriting. Our approach is pretty different in that we're small.

01:00We're intentionally a small team. So everyone we work with works directly with us. Mike and I are the founders and we also lead the project. So at a traditional big agency, the people who are started the company, the people who run the company, they're not the ones actually doing the work.

01:16They're not the people doing the writing and doing the design. And here that's the opposite. So we are not only the people who started the company and who run the company, but we also are the people doing a majority of the work. So I handle a lot of the copywriting and strategy myself.

01:29Mike leads all of the design along with his team. So you just get so much more connection between the people who we're working with, our partners, our clients, and our team because we're just the lynch pin between those two. Everybody has a brand.

01:41Brand is

Branding and Copywriting 101

01:48simply how people see you, right? So whether you spend a lot of time and money developing a brand or you don't, like Mike was talking about, like our favorite bagel shop where it's just a bag and it's like a Sharpie on a paper bag, that is still a brand even though there was no money spent on that brand.

02:05And it's letting people know we do not care about design. We only care about making the best bagels in this city. and you're conveying that through that medium even even if you didn't spend a single dime on that. And I think the thing that a lot of people miss about brand is that if you choose not to invest in it, you still have one.

02:19People will see you in a certain way. If you have a social media ad, then you you have an avatar. And what does that look like and what does that tell people about you? So, I like to think that what we do is we just help you understand what your brand is and you be in control of your brand instead of letting your audience decide your brand because you're not quite aware or you don't have a handle on it.

02:41So, and I think that's one of those things that when we give you a brand toolkit, that's not the end of the conversation, right? Like branding as an exercise doesn't mean like it's not a thing that you buy and then like great, I bought my brand.

02:52A brand is what you do every single day. Every single interaction you have is a part of your brand. every single customer service conversation, every single uh moment that somebody spends in your platform on your product if you're a client like Gamma, those are all part of your brand and we just give you the tools at the beginning to say, "Okay, here's here's how you can create a brand that will reach your audience.

03:11Here's the toolkit." And then you have to go out and you have to live that brand and be that brand every single day. So that's my like speech of like brand, you can't just like buy a brand. brand is how people see you. And how people see you will continue to change with everything that you do and every interactions that they have.

03:29And you can choose whether those interactions are better and better and they're more and more interested in being in your club or whether every time they interact with your customer service, they have a worse and worse impression of your brand.

03:34And then it doesn't matter how much money you spend on design if your customer service team isn't delivering on the qualities that your brand is conveying. Branding to me is just like what would you put a sticker on your car or your notebook or your laptop?

03:52Like a good brand is one of those things that exists more than just a a transaction. It's something that becomes part of your life. And I think that when you are creating a brand, it's so easy to think transactional. It's so easy to be like, "Oh, I want people to download this product or I want people to use this uh this, you know, menu or something, but I want people to want to live their life with that brand as part of their mental kind of like ecosystem."

04:23For me, the Vulc logo, when I was growing up skateboarding, I drew that logo on everything, every book, every year, every class. I I was just so obsessed with how beautiful and simple it was. So to me, I think that a brand is just something that like it pulls you in.

04:37It's almost like a gem or a crystal that you're just like you can't help but want to be near or can't help but you want to hold it. When you look at some of the brands we've made, I try to always make them have a little bit of tangible quality to them.

04:49Uh so people can actually feel like they can reach out and grab it or it could sit on your desk as like this really cool paper weight or something like that. Why is branding important for business for like products and things like that? I think that branding is important in that use case because it's the easier and easier it gets to make stuff the more that brand will actually make things that people want to have in their lives.

05:13When you have a product or something like you know I open Instagram every day like every single day I am influenced by the AI or the the UI in that product. it would be a disservice to not treat people with the with the respect of like you care about what's in their hand.

05:37when you're kind of invading people's lives, the least you can do is is respect the the attention that they are giving you uh and making a product or a UI or whatever a brand that feels like it's actually making their life better or making their life easier or making their life more fun or they're smiling when they open the app or something like that because there are so many things that want to take away your energy and take away your happiness that like I feel like it's brand's job or It's a brand's job to make you feel a little bit better, but it doesn't work like that.

06:09Doesn't work like that as much anymore. To me, I think the biggest mistake that and I don't even know if it's founders. I think the biggest mistake that happens when you're creating brands is that sometimes people think it's like logo type color.

06:21There is like that's the trifecta of brand. But realistically, there's so much more. There's so much more interesting things that you can do with photography, art direction. You can make like a cool way that you know the the type skews to represent motion or you can even bring in some sort of like really exciting uh movement in terms of like okay we're going to have this image be blurred or this image has like a 3D effect or it has like this uh X-ray MRI scan and coloring to for like a uh you know a healthcare company or something like that.

06:58people are so so quick to just be like, "Oh, no. I just need a logo. I just want to put a logo on a PowerPoint, you know, cover or something like that." And I think that brand is so much deeper than that. And I feel like if you're approaching it in this shallow kind of way, people will get to the bottom of it really quickly.

07:16And I think that that is something that is a very dangerous territory because like you're relying on the product to be absolutely impeccable if the brand is super super shallow. A verbal identity is all the words that you use to communicate.

07:28It kind of comes out of strategy. It, you know, often a strategy is mostly an inter internal facing document. It's mostly for your team if you're growing. It's things that you say to your team like, "Oh, here's the things that we value and we're never going to change or um here's what we're trying to do and and the way that we're going to position our company in order to do that."

07:47Verbal identity is once you cross that line between talking to your internal audience or maybe your partners and talking to your your external audience, right? So that's how do you what are your website going to say? What's the tone that you use?

07:58And then what are the actual words that you put on a website that you put on social posts that you put on ads that you put in a video? What's your tagline? What are your headlines? How do you talk about yourself? It's interesting because in some ways it's different than design because a lot of elements of design like a logo often you'll get a logo and you'll keep it and you won't touch it for a long time or you'll get a color palette and you'll sort of settle into that color palette and it doesn't change frequently.

08:20Words are different, right? So words change all the time and lots of people you're you know your website headline might change every couple of months who knows like you people are writing new elements and products all the time. So it's really important with a verbal identity to make sure you understand the overarching tone and personality of like who we are and how we talk so that then when you are writing new lines I mean never a verbal identity is never going to deliver all the words you ever need to use.

08:46Instead, it's just going to set the tone so that then you can continue to write new words that always feel on brand and like they're written by the same personality. Like for Gamma, for example, we worked on their verbal identity. The big idea that we really rooted everything in was this idea of get get your ideas out there.

09:03And we loved that as a starting point of when you think about who their audience is, they're not people who are so talented at designing a presentation or making their own website. there are people who are more interested in the ideas and just need it to get out there more quickly and that's exactly what Gamma does.

09:20So, we love this idea. Um, but then when you start to think, okay, what does that sound like? How do you express that idea to your audiences? We had so much fun working on the tone for this one because one of our tone words was imaginative and and so few brands get to be imaginative, you know, and I think there's just it's an unlock button when you get to say, "Oh, you don't have to use, you know, if I was a writer and somebody handed me a verbal identity that had imaginative, that means I get to use fun words."

09:42Like I don't have to use the same regular words that everybody else uses to say, "Start your presentation now." You can instead say, "Start a presentation about, I don't know, exploring the ocean now." And you can suddenly start to put a lot more personality into that brand because you have a verbal identity that tells you right from the beginning, use your imagination, do something interesting, do something different.

10:05We've built verbal identities for lots of clients. We're working right now with a client called Contra that helps uh freelancers get paid. And so they were a really really tricky verbal identity because they have two very distinct audiences, right?

10:18So that on the one hand they have the people who are freelancers, people who get want to get more jobs and get paid. Maybe they're a designer, maybe they're an animator, maybe they're a writer, maybe they're a developer, maybe they're a videographer, who knows?

10:28But they want sort of more 1099 work. They want to show their work off um and get hired. And then on the other side, you have the people who are going to hire them. And their reasons for being on Contra are very different because of those two audiences.

10:41So, it took us a lot of work to figure out how do we connect with both of them at the same time and make sure that we're communicating slightly different offerings, slightly different values, but in the same tone that feels consistent across the board and using the same sort of core messaging across the board.

10:58Our concept for them was get more creative because whether you're a creative a self-described creative person who's trying to get more work, it's this is a way for you to get more creative work, right? And on the other hand, if you're somebody who's trying to hire more creatives, you can get more creative team.

11:09You can get more creative with the way that you're forming your business and growing your business. If you want to scale more quickly, you don't necessarily have to hire the traditional way. So, we love it because it allows you to sort of like fill in the blank after creative of get more creative and then you can say whatever it is that you want in your mind.

11:27So, being able to hit on something that felt really powerful for both of those audiences was really fun. I would say the most common mistake that I see is thinking that exactly what you want people to do is what you should write. And I think that doesn't happen in advertising.

11:39You know, in the big advertising world, people are really understand that you don't write a billboard that says buy more chocolate. You make people want chocolate, right? You make them think, oh, there's nothing better than a bar of chocolate right now.

11:52And I think when you when a lot of people go a lot of particularly like in the tech world people who are building products or like writing a website they forget that and they go out and they say buy now on their website which is not actually the best way to get somebody to buy something.

12:09What you have to do is make them want it. You have to appeal to an emotion inside of them and make that connection. Right? So, if I were to talk like broadly in the world right now, I see a ton of ads, especially in the AI space that are all about efficiency and I just think it's ridiculous because I look I you could not you could stop a thousand people on the street and ask them what they want in life and no one is going to say I really wish I was more efficient.

12:29Like that's not an emotion. That's not a thing that people want. It's a thing that people want for their teams. It's a thing they want for their companies. Maybe they want other people who are they're paying to be more efficient, but nobody wants that for themselves.

12:42So, I just think you have to connect with something beyond that, something that people actually want, something that feels positive to them instead of just saying AI, it'll make you more efficient. Like, that's not actually a thing people want to buy.

12:55So, let's move beyond the efficiency and figure out what can what can it provide that's a benefit to my life. Copywriting is so interesting. In one of my early jobs, I used to talk with one of my good copywriting friends about copywriting is either the easiest job in the world or the hardest job in the world.

13:08And it just all depends on how well you do it. And I think particularly now in the world of AI, if you're writing something that sounds like JT GPT could write it, then you're it's going to be hard out there because the the the reality is like there's a whole new set of tools that are going to be capable of writing copy.

13:26And the only thing we have the only leg up we have on chatbt, it's like it's not speed, it's not efficiency, but we can be more creative and we can think from like a more human perspective. So to me, the main difference between fine copy and good copy is what's the emotion?

13:44What's the feeling that's behind it? How do you make somebody read something and feel something? So I like to think of copywriting much more from a storytelling perspective or a cinematic perspective of like how do you make something feel emotional and strike a chord with somebody as opposed to simply conveying information, right?

14:03Of course, you want to convey information as well, especially when you're on a website and practical executions. A lot of bad copywriting stops at conveying information. It conveys information, and that's fine, but it doesn't make somebody feel something.

14:15And when I often hear people say things like, "Oh, people don't read anymore." I'm like, "That is so not true. People read all of Game of Thrones, and Game of Thrones was an incredibly long and incredibly dense book. Why? Because it was filled with emotion."

14:26People read a lot, but they only read when it makes them feel something, and they're not interested in reading very dense and informative information. So, I I think that the main differentiator if you want something to be good is for it to be emotional.

14:38And I think that's also happens to be what gives us a leg up on Chat GPT is because Chad GPT doesn't have any emotions. So, it can try to emulate emotion, but it can't genuinely understand the difference between who headlines. If one of those headlines makes your heart hurt and the other one doesn't, CHBT doesn't know the difference.

14:55technically they might be equal. So my advice to any copywriter out there would be like write with your heart. Like put as much emotion and heart as you can into everything and you're more likely to hit something that that changes the world or makes a

Building the Perplexity and Gamma Brands

15:12difference. We've had clients before. So Perplexity in particular was a really hard client because their audience is literally everyone. Like they in the same way that like Google's audience is everyone. They want anyone on the planet to be able to go to Google and find something and perplexity wanted that same thing.

15:28So there was no like defining yeah but who's more likely to use this or who like no it's just how do you appeal to everyone all at the same time and that's really really hard. What they wanted to do was so aspirational and so we were somewhat lucky in that we did it a little bit earlier.

15:40I feel like the AI field is messier now and it's more crowded now than it was. But at the time it felt like there were only a few serious contenders in AI. And so it was much easier to be like okay as opposed to chat GBT and you know maybe co-pilot like what do you do differently than the the key ones.

15:59I think Bard was at the time we were looking at Bard as one of their competitors and so um it we really quickly came to this fact that they had citations and no one else at the time was doing it in quite the same way. It allowed you to turn your AI experience from, you know, chatbt, you ask something, it gives you information and that's sort of like a dead end into a portal to everything, right?

16:20So like basically turning it into like what Google used to be, which is the front page of the internet. Like perplexity is now your your starting point and then you can click any of those citation links and go anywhere you want to go. So we were eventually able to hone in on like this one differentiator that set them apart, which is the difference between perplexity and a chatbt.

16:39Chatbt is like great, we're going to give you an answer to your problem. Perplexity is going to open up doors to knowledge. So you're going to be able to continue to discover, right? And there is a very big difference between like, I want to know something, great, here's the answer.

16:56It's like the old classic like are you going to give somebody a fish? Are you going to teach them to fish? It's like are you going to say great here's the answer great now I know the answer and I'm done with this interaction or are you going to say here's the information and if you would like to learn more about that here's all the places that you can go that language of like circling around the idea of knowledge and then that's circling around perplexity as the place where it begins like everything starts here but then it can go further and eventually that

17:20became the headline of like you know where knowledge begins which is really beautiful but for the most part something like gamma it's actually easier than that because you can think about okay maybe you want everyone to be able to use gamma ultimately, but who are there are certainly people who for whom it's more it's a better bet that they're going to be using it.

17:33So like I think about gamma and sometimes it's helpful to think about who it's not for, right? So gamma is like not for my mom. She doesn't like computers. She's scared of AI. Like this is not her feature. She's going to be overwhelmed. Cool.

17:45We rule her out. Gamma is also not for Mike. He's a talented designer. He can do his own deck presentation and he doesn't need Gamma to do that magic for him. He knows how to design a deck. So, how do you find in the middle something that feels like it resonates, right?

17:57And I just always find that really being able to create an accurate picture of that person in your head. So, for gamut, it might be educators. Here's a teacher. I think about the teachers that I know and I think about what their lives are like and I think about who they are and what their daily routines are and what what they do that's different than what I do and what their needs are and what kinds of presentations they might make.

18:22And then the more time you just really spend treating your audience like almost like you're in a novel or you're in a movie and you're putting yourself in the shoes of that character, then that allows you to really think, okay, how do I talk to them in a way that's going to matter to them, not necessarily matter to me.

18:34I feel like we've gotten really lucky with a few logos that like, you know, the exposure logo is just like a globe with a star in it. The perplexity logo is like a spinning door. And so like, how do I approach shaping logos and stuff? A lot of the times I'll try to push it into really far extremes first and then simplify simplify simplify and like weirdly a lot of the times like I'll just post it on Twitter and I'll be like has anyone seen this before?

18:58You know what I mean? And so a lot of the times the collective hive mind of Twitter or X or whatever you're calling it now is better than any design book or any kind of database I could check or something like that. Um but I always just try to make sure that our logos have like like a 10% strange thing about them.

19:17And I think that that is a really important part of the studio is that like I want to make sure that we're not creating just a classic geometric logo that everyone's seen a million times or something like that. And in this age or in this time, people are cranking out logos that look like flowers and the most like like three circles or something like that.

19:30And I'm like, what are we what are we even doing? Like that's not that's not ownable in any way. So I feel like just trying to get to the foundational parts of what why this company exists in the first place. We don't just create logos just to fill a space.

19:48That's never ever what we're doing. And so I think that as long as the logo can kind of tell a story and like convey an emotion or convey a strategy or something like that, that's when we know we're on to something. And so we'll create so so many logos when we're doing identity process, the going through the identity process.

20:07We'll create dozens of things that anyone else would be like, "Oh yeah, that works. That's perfect. Like that's fine. It fits. It's beautiful. But we always try to push it a little bit further to feel a little bit more interesting. Same with color.

20:18I was in a I was in a call one time with someone that was like, "Oh, I just eyropper things from Pinterest." And I was like, I like think about color in the deepest darkest way possible of like, can it work in light mode? Can it work in dark mode?

20:30Can we find panones for this thing? Uh just trying to be responsible with color is something that is really exciting to me and it's where it's where I find the most joy these days is like when two colors that maybe don't quite go together still create some sort of exciting thing or exciting vibration between them like that's really exciting to me.

20:49So yeah, I always spend a lot of time on on color and just making sure that you leave time to explore is a really important

The Story Behind Smith & Diction

21:02thing. I grew up in New Jersey right outside of the city. Uh, but I grew up skateboarding, coming to the city to skateboard here. I grew up in the heydays of Love Park. So, a lot of really awesome skateboarders were hanging out there at that time.

21:08And so, I was just kind of obsessed with Philly from such a young age. I would draw the love sign over and over and over again on all of my notebooks and things in in school. And then in high school, I I had a really great art teacher. I had two really great art teachers that were like, "You really need to be focused on doing something with art."

21:27and that is something that I think that that you should be you really kind of hyperfocused on for college. And I was like, I think I'm going to go be a history teacher. And they were like, what if you just applied to one one art school just for us just to see how uh see how you like it.

21:45And then I did. I ended up going to an art school in Delaware. Quickly transferred out of that cuz I hated art school. I didn't really enjoy art school that much because I was commuting to this college. So I was driving an hour there, driving an hour back.

21:56And I got there and just like nobody took it seriously. So like everyone was like questioning the homework assignments or being like, "Oh, I didn't quite understand the homework, so I just didn't do it." And so I was like, "I'm working two jobs.

22:07I'm driving here. I'm commuting here." And I'm still getting the homework done. But you guys, for some reason, don't believe in this part of your career. And I think that car and I talk about this all the time of just like ever since I saw Photoshop for the first time and realized what you could make with it.

22:26I was like this is going to be the rest of my life and I have no backup plan. I have no other thing I want to do. This is exactly what I want to do. So when I was in art school I like a lot of people were still figuring out what they wanted to do.

22:40I would say most of them were still figuring out what they wanted to do and I just was like I don't want to be around this. and um went to a local university in South Jersey where I fell in love with print making. That's where I did a lot of like posters.

22:50I made a ton of posters, learned about setting type. I learned about etching prints and plates and things like that. So print is like deep deep inside of my DNA. And so I love to bring that print ethos into a lot of the things that I'm working on today.

23:03And I'm not so like focused on making the next best digital product. I'm focused on making something that someone want to hang on their walls. I was so obsessed with things like element skateboards and girl and chocolate and all that stuff.

23:14So, I was just like, how can I make a career doing that stuff? And that was what really excited me. And I also realized through skateboarding that like brand is so much more of an identity for people than a lot of people might think. Like, you know, if you're not skateboarding, you might be like, "Sure, I buy a special kind of soap, but that's not your identity."

23:41You know what I mean? But when you skateboard, you ride that deck and you can get sponsored by that company. So that company can pay you to have their board under your feet or their shoes on your feet. And it just became so much deeper of a obsession when you think about like design can actually be used as like a a proxy for your identity.

24:00Yeah. After college, I worked at an advertising agency in South Jersey. There I kind of just learned a lot of the basics of the programs. After that, I went to work at a place called 160 over 90, which is where I met Cara and she was my copywriting partner and I was the design side of it.

24:19So, we grew up in the brand design space completely united. We were together on every single thing that we worked on. So, we basically have one brain now of how we think about design and uh the approach to branding. After that, we both went to a place called Charity Water in New York City.

24:36And that's where we really focused on the idea of design can do really good things for the world. While working at Charity Water, you learned that design can change the world through its pure power to make people believe in a cause. When I went to work at Charity Water, the mission there is to kind of solves the world's water crisis.

24:57But their vision, the thing that's above that is to reinvent the idea of charity. You know, growing up, you always see like, oh, Charity doesn't have any money for design or it always kind of feels like it doesn't quite fit inside of this. It shouldn't look fancy.

25:08But working at Charity Water, we really focused on things feeling nice and feeling like, you know, uh, something that you should pay attention to. Utilizing design to draw attention to these really important things in the world was something that I was just so excited to be a part of.

25:21and we helped raise a few million dollars when we were there for clean water projects in Africa and all over the world. It was really awesome just to be around people who were excited about helping people cuz when I went there I was at a pretty low point in my design career where I was like is design just making millionaires more money and I if so I don't really want to be part of that.

25:46I left the agency world uh to focus on just can design be used for good and I believe it can and had a great time while I was there and and learned so so much. Scott Harrison is when you're around him, you just want to do well and you just want to um you know help solve the world's biggest problems and he makes you believe it's possible.

26:04And so I feel like I try to bring a little bit of that energy to our studio and to the work that we create where we're just like, "Yeah, sure. It's no problem. If you want to change the world a little bit, like we we'll help you try to do that as best we can."

26:15And we learned about writing a really good mission statement, having really good strategy, and also just like the impact that social media can have on people. We learned a lot of that stuff at Charity Water. And then after Charity Water, we looked around New York for a little bit.

26:27And we were like, "Okay, like what's our next step? What's our next move?" And I really just didn't want to work for anybody else ever again. And so we moved home and we're like, "All right, let's give this studio a shot. We'll see what happens.

26:38As long as I can pay my rent every month, well, this will be a great success." And 10 years later, here we are. So, uh, still paying rent, you know, still really excited about making stuff and, um, but yeah, so that's that's my whole life story.

26:52Mike is, um, honestly, it's wild. He's unlike most people. He's not he's not a regular person, you know, regular people like I wouldn't have started this company by myself. I think um, I'm lucky because I learned early on uh, the value of design, right?

27:11Like you can say a great headline, but if your great headline is just scribbled on a cardboard box, it doesn't have the same power as when it's when that design and the copyrightiting are really working together. And so it was never my idea to start the company.

27:23He like told me he wanted to start his own company on our first date. And I think I probably knew that even beforehand cuz we'd been working together for months already and we'd been working all day every day together. So I knew a lot about him even before we started dating.

27:34And it was 100% his vision. I was just like, "Cool. I love writing and I love um the creativity of it. So if that's your vision, I will be behind your vision 100%. He's just refuses to let anything be mediocre and if it's not good enough, we won't present it.

27:51But I do also think that we are a little bit different than a lot of studios in you know the practical side. Like our team, we don't have a lot of meetings. We don't spend a lot of time on sil we don't have a lot of team building events. Like summer on our team, she lives in a different state.

28:02We see her maybe once or twice a year. We the our team our designers they come into work and they spend eight hours designing and then they go home. So because we get them to mostly focus on their craft and getting better at their craft instead of being in required team building events or doing time sheets or having HR conversation like none of that is a part of their days.

28:23We just really avoid all of the things that aren't mostly just design. We have one team meeting a day where everybody syncs up to make sure we're all on the same page. And then other than that, we mostly just let people do what they do. And I think that helps us make better work because the main thing that you do is actually work on the work instead of spending your day in meetings.

28:41Do you have a plan to scale your business? I mean, Mike is not scalable. No. In America, there is like a desperate culture of growth and you must make more money every year and you have to grow and you have to succeed and grow and grow and grow and like everything you make has to be bigger and better than it last.

29:02And we have to fight against that so hard, but really and truly our goal is never to be a big company. Like we want to be a small company where we are still doing the work every single day for as long as we have this company. We've always wanted to grow like a little bit because if we were a little maybe 10 people, we could have a little bit more capacity to do more projects at once and you know have a bigger team.

29:21But like you said, Mike isn't scalable. So we've we've already just with our team of five reached the point where if we grow much more then he will less and less be able to actually do the design. And so we're very very conscious of that. And we do not want to I mean part of the reason we started this company was so that he could be a designer.

29:41When you look at a traditional agency and your like career path, you go from being a designer to a senior designer to like an art director to like a creative director and very soon all you are is in meetings. All you are doing is giving creative direction and you never design anything.

29:57And Mike, that's part of why we started this company is cuz he just wants his title to be designer forever. He just wants to be making the designs. And so, so far we've been able to keep doing that where he is a lead designer on every single project.

30:09And that's really really how we want to keep it. We'll see if we're able to do that forever or not, but um that's the goal. How did I get to this point in my career is a really good example of just like not having a backup plan and just trying really really hard and failing like a lot.

30:23You know, that's something that I think is super super important for for people. It's like especially in this new age of AI, like you can have things spit out answers and things without even thinking about it. And to me, I'm just like, there's so much beauty in messing up and not being afraid to mess up.

30:43And I think that like skateboarding is the the ethos of that. Like you only land a trick once, but you try it 60 times. You fall in your face, you break your board, you you you have thrown your body down this set of stairs or off this ledge 20 times, and at the point you're like your your body's like, I can't take anymore.

31:06But then like you come really close to landing one and you're like all of a sudden that energy just comes right back up and you're like I'm going to try it one more time and then you land it and that's just it was all worth it. And so for design I'm just like not afraid to mess up and I'm not afraid to put out some stuff that maybe people don't like as long as I learned something about myself in the process.

31:24Like I said there's no backup plan. I'm doing this until I die. So, it's like why would I ever be scared of learning or be scared of failing when like this is it? I'm there's going of course there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows.

31:37So, why not just try it every single day? And I think that's the most important thing when people get scared of trying. That's when you fall into safety. That's when you fall into being like, "Oh, I just wish I could grab like these pieces and like collage them in a way, like do some scrapbooking."

31:56And I'm just like, "No, I want to reinvent the book." like almost every single time. Just that's that's the point. It's why we're doing this. It's like I don't I don't understand people that are just like I wish it was easier and I'm like why?

32:07Like I'm having so much more fun making the stuff. That's where I have that's where my heart feels the feelings of you know um you're inventing something. I guess you're creating something from scratch and there's nothing more beautiful than that.

32:26[Music]