Branding Masterclass for AI FoundersㅣSmith & Diction

Chara Smith 0:00 Copywriting 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?

Speaker 0:10 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.

Chara Smith 0:18 I 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 in the street and ask them what they want in life, and no one is gonna say, "I really wish I was more efficient."

Speaker 0:31 I am Mike Smith. I run, uh, Smith & Diction with my wife Chara in the beautiful Bok building in Philadelphia. Smith & Diction is a design studio. We mainly focus on creating thoughtful identities for imaginative clients. We work on companies like Perplexity, Gamma, Exposure, and Anterior. It's just anything that feels really, really unique.

Chara Smith 0:51 I'm Chara Smith, and I run Smith & Diction with my husband, Mike. I run most of the diction side of what we do, so I oversee all of our strat- brand strategy and messaging and copywriting. Our approach is pretty different in that we're small. We'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. They'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. Mike 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 linchpin between those two.

Chara Smith 1:47 Everybody has a brand. Brand is simply 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, and 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. People 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. So, 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." A 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. Here'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, and 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. And 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.

Speaker 3:46 Branding to me is just like what would you put a sticker on your car or your notebook or your laptop? Like 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. For me, the Volcom 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. It'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 wanna hold it. When you look at some of the brands we've made, I try to always make 'em have a little bit of tangible quality to them, uh, 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 paperweight or something like that. Why is branding important for business for like products and things like that? I think that branding's 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. When 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 s- the res- with the respect of like you care about what's in their hand. When 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, 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 wanna take away your energy and take away your happiness that like I feel like it's brand's job to- Or it's a brand's job to make you feel a little bit better, but it doesn't work like that. Doesn'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. They're just 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 gonna 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, a, you know, a healthcare company," or something like that. People are so, so quick to just be like, "Oh, no, I just need a logo. I just wanna 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. And 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.

Chara Smith 7:27 A verbal identity is all the words that you use to communicate. It kind of comes out of strategy. It's, you know, often a strategy is mostly an interior, 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 gonna change," or, um, "Here's what we're trying to do and h- and the way that we're gonna position our company in order to do that." Verbal 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 is your website gonna say? What's the tone that you use? And 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. Words are different, right? So words change all the time, and lots of people... Your, you know, your website headline might change every couple of months. Who knows? Like, you m- 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 f- a verbal identity is never going to deliver all the words you ever need to use. Instead, it's just gonna 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, and we love 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. They're 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. So 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..." It... You know, if I was a writer and somebody handed me, uh, a verbal identity that had imaginative, that means I get to use fun words. Like, 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, uh, 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." We'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? So they, 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? But they want sort of t- more 1099 work. They wanna show their work off, um, and get hired. And then on the other side, you have the people who are gonna hire them, and their reasons for being on Contra are very different because of those two audiences. So 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. Our concept for them was get more creative because whether you're a creative, a self-de- 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. You can get more creative with the way that you're forming your business and growing your business. If you wanna 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. So 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. You 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." And 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. What 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 gonna say, "I really wish I was more efficient." Like, that's not an emotion. That's not a thing that people want. A- 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. So 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 wanna buy. So 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, and 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 ChatGPT could write it, then you're-- it's gonna 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. And the only thing we have, the only leg up we have on ChatGPT, 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? What'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? Of course, you wanna 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. And 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. People 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, and I think that's also happens to be what gives us a leg up on ChatGPT is 'cause ChatGPT doesn't have any emotions. So it can try to emulate emotion, but it can't genuinely understand the difference between two headlines if one of those headlines makes your heart hurt and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT doesn't know the difference. Technically, 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

Chara Smith 15:09 or makes a difference. We've had clients before... So Perplexity in particular was a really hard client because their audience is literally everyone. Like, they... The-- 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. So 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. I 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 ChatGPT and, you know, maybe Copilot, like, what do you do differently than the, the key ones? I 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, ChatGPT, you ask something, it gives you information, and that's sort of like a dead end into a portal to everything, right? So, like, basically turning it into, like, what Google used to be, which is the front page of the internet. Like, Perplexity is now your s- your starting point, and then you can click any of those citation links and go anywhere you wanna 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 ChatGPT. ChatGPT is like, "Great, we're gonna give you an answer to your problem." Perplexity is going to open up doors to knowledge, so you're gonna be able to continue to discover, right? And there is a very big difference between, like, "I wanna know something. Great, here's the answer." It's like the old classic, like, are you gonna give somebody a fish or are you gonna 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 gonna 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 circling around Perplexity is the place where it begins, like everything starts here, but then it can go further, and eventually that became 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 certainly people who, for whom it's more, it's a better bet that they're gonna be using it. So 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 gonna be overwhelmed. Cool, we rule her out. Gamma's 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? And I just always h- find that really being able to create a, an accurate picture of that person in your head, so for Gamma, 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. And 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 gonna matter to them, not necessarily matter to me?"

Speaker 18:37 I 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?" You 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. And I think that that is a really important part of the studio is that like I wanna 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. And I'm like, what are you, what are we even doing? [laughs] Like that's not, that's not ownable in any way. So I feel like just trying to get to the foundational part of what, why this company exists in the first place. We don't just create logos just to fill space. That'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, uh, a strategy or something like that, that's when we know we're onto something. And so we'll create so, so many logos when we're doing identity process, the, going through the identity process. We'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. I was in a, I was in a call one time with someone that was like, "Oh, I just eyedropper 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? Can we find Pantones for this thing? Uh, just trying to be responsible with color is something that's, 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. So 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

Speaker 21:00 thing. So 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. And 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, and that is something that I think that, that you should be, you're really kind of hyper-focused on for college." And I was like, "I think I'm gonna go be a history teacher." [laughs] 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?" And then I did. I ended up going to an art school in Delaware, quickly transferred out of that 'cause I hated art school. But 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. And 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. I'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 Chara 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, I 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 wanna do." So when I was in art school, I like, a lot of people were still figuring out what they wanted to do. I would say most of them were still figuring out what they wanted to do, and I just was like, "I don't wanna be around this." And, um, went to a local university in South Jersey where I fell in love with printmaking. That's where I did a lot of like posters. I 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. And I'm not so like focused on making the next best digital product. I'm focused on making something that someone would wanna hang on their walls. I was so obsessed with things like Element skateboards and Girl and Chocolate and all that stuff, so 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. You 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. Yeah, after college, I worked at a- 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 160overNinety, which is where I met Chara, and she was my copywriting partner, and I was the design side of it. So 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, and 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 learn 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, but 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. But 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, and 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. 'Cause 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." I left the agency world, uh, to focus on just can design be used for good, and I believe it can, and I 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. And 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 wanna change the world a little bit, like, we- we'll help you try to do that as best we can." And 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, and we were like, "Okay," like, "what's our next step? What's our next move?" And I really just didn't wanna 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. As long as I can pay my rent every month, we'll... this will be a great success." And 10 years later, here we are. [laughs] 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. [laughs]

Chara Smith 26:55 Mike 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 [laughs] company by myself. I think, um, I'm lucky because I learned early on, uh, the value of design, right? Like, 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 copywriting are really working together. And so it was never my idea to start the company. He, like, told me he wanted to start his own company on our first date, and I think I probably knew that even beforehand, 'cause 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. And 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. But 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. We 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. We 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.

Speaker 28:46 Do you have a plan to scale your business? I mean, Mike is not scalable.

Chara Smith 28:52 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 the last, and 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, may- may- maybe 10 people, we could have a little bit more capacity to do more projects at once and, you know, have a bigger team. But 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 wanna... I mean, part of the reason we started this company was so that he could be a designer. When 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. And Mike, that's part of why we started this company is 'cause 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, and that's really, really how we wanna keep it. We'll see if we're able to do that forever or not, but, um, that's the goal.

Speaker 30:18 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. You 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, and 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 on your face. You break your board. You, you th- you have thrown your body down this set of stairs or off this ledge, uh, 20 times, and at that point you're like, your, your body's like, "I can't take anymore." But 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 gonna 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. Like 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, I'm just go- of course there's gonna be highs and there's gonna be lows, so 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." And I'm just like, "No, I wanna 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?" [laughs] Like, 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. [gentle music]