Designing Products and Building Brands for Startups
Growing up, I always had an entrepreneurial bug. ?
When I was 17, I founded a day camp that started out with just me and a bunch of friends playing basketball with a dozen kids. Seven years and a lot of water fights later ?, the camp grew to 80 campers and 14 staff.
While in college, I founded, conceptualized and ran the National Hillel Basketball Tournament ?, a tournament that brought together 200 Jewish basketball players from 30 universities across North America. The tournament is going strong into its 8th year.
After school, I flew across the globe to Startup Nation, where I took a gig as a marketer and—because we were a 7-person team I defaulted to—designer. Fast forward a few years: the startup was acquired ?, I spent a year freelancing ? for some amazing people at various businesses and scrappy startups ?, and then moved to New York City ??. In NYC, I spent 2+ years designing products for commerce marketers at Bluecore.
Throughout my life I’ve always been really interested in social innovation – working at nonprofits, volunteering with some amazing causes, but never felt like I was giving it my all. I feel so lucky to be working on bringing people closer to amazing organizations with Millie, an app for millennial giving. Check out what we’re working on here: getmillie.com
Product Design
I’m passionate about designing products that will change people’s everyday, especially at work. B2B software is notorious for not emphasizing design or user experience. There should be no difference in caliber of experience between B2B and B2C products, because after all, we’re designing products for people.
Design as a Differentiator at a B2B Company @ FirstMark Capital’s Design Driven:
Branding
I love transforming a company’s internal identity into a brand that speaks to the rest of the world. The collaborative nature of developing a brand identity is extremely rewarding. It all begins with the team diving into what the company stands for and how it would like to be positioned in the market. That then turns into a bunch of brainstorms and iterations, allowing us to hone in on the perfect brand.
Visual Design
I like to think of visual design as the entire package, branding every customer and prospect touchpoint: from website to sales decks, from one pagers to reports, and from fundraise pitches to infographics.