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Startup: How We Got Here & What’s Next
160 Plays1 year ago
In the very first episode of The Somewhat Creative Show, Rocky and Clark share how they got their start in the design world, the key lessons they’ve learned along the way, and their advice for anyone looking to break into creative fields. They also give a sneak peek at what’s to come on the show—expect industry insights and creative chaos.
Transcript
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to the Somewhat Creative Show, where two graphic artists dive into the latest tools, trends, and ideas shaping the creative world. Whether you're in design, branding, advertising, media, photography, video, startups, or tech, this is the podcast for people who live and breathe creativity.
00:00:28
Speaker
Just maybe not all the time. I'm your host, Rocky Tilney. No, it's all the time. And I'm Clark Miller. Since this is our very first episode, I wanted to kind of dive into the idea of startups and how to start things and what getting started is like and how did we get started?
00:00:45
Speaker
We've been working on this podcast idea for a long time and it took a while to get started. And we're probably a month into it and this is our first episode.
00:00:55
Speaker
And why are we starting a podcast? Why are we starting a podcast is a great question. I mean, i think, and probably for a lot of creatives, there's not a whole lot, ah unless you're working with other creatives often, there's not a whole lot of opportunity to really discuss creative things.
00:01:14
Speaker
It's true. and Not only how it affects you, like just personally, ah from a business standpoint, I think there's so many topics that are sort of untapped that, and so I was thinking, well, hey, we should really be talking about some of these creative things out in the open because I think it's ah sort of a missing element of just the creative industry in general.
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And just in your, I think, I feel like in your creative life, it's usually a very isolated sort of experience. You're kind of just on your computer. You're not bouncing things off of other people a lot.
00:01:51
Speaker
At least that's how it has been for me for most of my career. Well, and when we when we throw in the pandemic and a lot of work from home opportunities, I mean, that wasn't new for me. I've always sort of been remote, um having an office for a few years, but always going back to mainly working out of my house.
00:02:15
Speaker
And I think that um during the pandemic, more and more people were Doing that, obviously. And they never went back to ah but what would you would consider sort of this normal work environment.
00:02:27
Speaker
True. Either it's hybrid or they're in the office, you know, just once in a while, that sort of thing. I also think there's just a lot of really bad creative podcasts out there. And maybe ours will just be another one of the bad podcasts out there, but...
00:02:42
Speaker
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just saying, there's a lot of ones that I've listened to, especially over the last month when we're talking about starting hours. And I'm like, this is not good. They're either they're either just two idiots talking to each other about not nothing that I'm interested in, which, again, could go that way.
00:03:01
Speaker
or Or it's um a lot of advice stuff, a lot of like how to market your creative agency. And it's very specific. And I'm like, that just doesn't, that doesn't apply to me. That's very niche.
00:03:14
Speaker
And they do say go niche with these things, but that just feels a little too niche for most people. So I think. You know, I like the idea of our podcast being very broad and we can talk about a lot of creativity, like this idea of a startup.
00:03:27
Speaker
It can go from how we got started to starting a company like Rocky and I both started creative agencies and done a lot. So yeah.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think kind of a zoomed out view of this. I've listened to lot of design podcasts where they get into the really tactical sort of technical aspects of creativity or ah running an agency. And I feel like it's more this this is an opportunity more about storytelling and experience Um, and just having a little bit more fun with it.
00:04:02
Speaker
Like not so I could on that, on that note, I was actually wondering, cause I don't know if I've ever asked you like how you started in your agency. I had it cause you've been doing this now for what, 20 plus years.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's been a long time actually. Um, and it's sometimes when I look back, I'm like, wow, that's, it's a long time. Um, I was, I actually started my first design company, Studio 22, when I was um working full time.
00:04:33
Speaker
And this was back in 1998. Were you working in a creative role? I was working in for a tech company, ah IT company in Silicon Valley.
00:04:44
Speaker
And they um I was doing just this was stuff. I was going to school at the same time. so it was like I was going to school in the evenings. I was working at this company doing essentially shipping and receiving was my first sort of job there.
00:05:01
Speaker
And that evolved because I was studying advertising and illustration, animation, those things. And so it evolved into, hey this guy could do this stuff. Let's have him do our marketing.
00:05:14
Speaker
So they put me in charge of creative services. i mean, that's a classic. Yeah. I think that's the classic story of getting started in this industry is there was no one else that was doing it and you were just at the right place. Yeah. And they saw me doodling on the whiteboard one day and they were like, Hey, maybe he could do marketing.
00:05:33
Speaker
And I was like, sure. I mean, I'm reading about all this stuff. It was all like just book knowledge at that point. Nothing ah practical yet. And um so I started i started doing that i just learned as much as I could. I had someone there teach me HTML, um which was like, everyone has a website now. We need a website. And so i was like, all right, I could do that.
00:05:52
Speaker
So I started doing the website. And then they put me just in charge of all the creative services and marketing for the company. And that's sort of how I got started. Back then, though, I knew, I'm like, I don't want to work for a company like this for long term. I'm going to spin up something on the side.
00:06:08
Speaker
built a website for for myself. I was 22 at the time and I was like, well, maybe Studio 22 Design is a good name because I'm 22. Because you never thought you would get older. You were going to be 22 forever. That was creative. I had to change the name every year. was ridiculous.
00:06:22
Speaker
So that's how the name ah began was for Studio 22 Design was just my age. So it's not very creative naming process. We're going to devote a podcast episode to naming at some point because that is a struggle.
00:06:37
Speaker
in I think in projects you and I have worked on and just in ah in general is like a tough area to think about. Yeah. But no, that's interesting. That like, as it sounds like a great way to kind of, you got your feet wet in a lot of different aspects of this kind of creative world that we're both in.
00:06:57
Speaker
i So I was in, i was going to junior college and I was actually trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do. And that's part of the reason I didn't go to a four-year college. Cause I'm like, why waste money when I'm like still trying to figure it out.
00:07:12
Speaker
But I was really into photography. I had a very influential, as I'm sure we all have in our childhood, a very influential photography teacher in high school who really, that's all I wanted to do was just take photos and like got very involved in that program and the art program and in general. And so I was very into that once I got to college and, but everybody had said, and I'm sure a lot of creative people get this, that you're never going to be able to make money doing that. Like,
00:07:39
Speaker
keep that as a hobby, figure out a real job, like that, that kind of response to it. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do at the same time I was doing photography. I got onto the school newspaper and started doing photography there and then quickly figured out that similar to your story, like no one at that newspaper knew how to actually put together a newspaper.
00:08:01
Speaker
So I taught myself InDesign. I taught myself, you know i was already kind of familiar with Photoshop because of my photography stuff. So I started learning Illustrator and InDesign back. This was before it was even CS. I think it was.
00:08:14
Speaker
And you probably remember this is like Photoshop six when they were just a number. Yep. Anyway, i I just kind of taught myself a lot of these programs because I and i think you've probably run into this too. There's not a lot. These programs come out so quickly and there's new stuff dropping. Like the amount of programs that you and I have probably used in our careers that we no longer use that it was like a waste of time almost to learn.
00:08:40
Speaker
I'm thinking specifically about Flash. Cause I remember when I was first starting out, Adobe flash was like, everybody wanted to build a website in flash. You had right amazing animations and you wanted everything to be super interactive. And that was the only way to do it. Cause HTML is just really basic. I mean, this was before, you know, CSS basically.
00:09:01
Speaker
So that, I think that's kind of how I got started. And that's, you know, that's the advice. Anytime I talk to ah someone trying to get started in this creative world is, is,
00:09:13
Speaker
Don't wait for a job to come along to give you the opportunity to do it. Just start doing it. You can write get these programs now, monthly fees. And I remember at that time when we were starting out, it was a pretty good amount of money to like get some of the programs that you needed to start doing design.
00:09:32
Speaker
I would skip years. Yeah. For like upgrades. Like I remember with Adobe, Adobe came out with their suite. It wasn't the cloud. um But it was ah ah a disc set with all their stuff on it.
00:09:45
Speaker
And it was over, I think it was, if I recall, close to $200 for that. Oh, at least. Yeah. And that's like, you have to do that every year if you want the latest and greatest. For like a 20 year old, that's a, you know, decent amount of money. Yeah. It was like, no I'll just keep using the old one because it didn't change.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, I will say i hope nobody, I don't think anybody's listening to this podcast anyway yet, but I hope nobody from Adobe is listening because I definitely have done some theft of their software programs in my career when I was starting out.
00:10:19
Speaker
Because you that was back when you could like, you know, get a copy from a buddy. and You get a copy from a buddy. I remember a friend of mine knew a guy who was a graphic designer and he was house sitting and he told me, hey, he's got the ah the Adobe, the latest Adobe suite.
00:10:34
Speaker
And he's only got it loaded on one computer. is ah His license will still cover more. no Right. right i think everybody did that at one point, for sure. So it is interesting, though, to see how um people get started. there There was so much, at least I know when I was just starting in design, um there were so many projects I took on that I had no idea how to actually complete yeah I was just like, yeah, we could do that.
00:11:02
Speaker
And so it was like, i don't know if it was just being stupid or naive or optimistic or a combination of all three that I was like, I'm just going to figure out how to do this.
00:11:14
Speaker
um And I mean, lucky for us, we have the internet always. yeah so we could always just go and look at tutorials or um write-ups or blog posts about how people were using the tools and the apps to figure it out.
00:11:30
Speaker
So that true that saved my my butt so many times with projects. Yeah, definitely. I mean, i think we're we live in an age where it's like all that information is there. And, you know, do you need somebody to teach it to you if if you could just go online and find it?
00:11:46
Speaker
I mean, this was probably when we started out before YouTube and there was not as many of that stuff out there, but still enough to to help you out.
00:11:59
Speaker
Let's switch. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just going to ask what, what program what actually just like what in general from your time when you remember starting out, like was the hardest part it or the the part you like the least maybe.
00:12:14
Speaker
The hardest part of any creative business is always the business side of it. Yeah. um Yeah. I have mine. Taxes. Yeah. The reason people get into design because they love design. Not because, oh, I love the business of selling design.
00:12:29
Speaker
That's always the worst part of the business. It's because it's so hard to figure out pricing and to come up with like... who are we targeting from a customer standpoint, um, communication with clients. Like that's something that, uh, was difficult to learn yeah because I, you know, i think when you go into design, you're naive enough to still be super excited about the work and everything you do.
00:12:55
Speaker
um But you're I didn't realize until way later that, oh, I have to sell everything I create even after I get the the contract. like ah I'm not just like, oh, I'm just doing design work and you guys are going to love it.
00:13:08
Speaker
yeah um I had to learn that, oh, everything i so everything I submit to a client to review, I'm actually selling that idea. It's not, here are three ideas, pick one that you like.
00:13:21
Speaker
That's not selling. Yeah, you know it's funny you mention because i I remember that experience. that exact same experience when I was younger. And I was, I think I was in a architecture class because I wanted to do something. I knew I wanted to do something creative.
00:13:37
Speaker
And so I was taking an architecture class and then I slowly through working with the, the professors who were kind of former architects or current architects, I can't remember, but they were talking about it's, it's like, you can either do one of two things in architecture. You can,
00:13:50
Speaker
be the person sitting on the computer, like designing how much space is for the toilet, you know, that makes sure like ADA appropriate and everything. Or you can be the guy that's like going out and trying to get clients and selling ideas. And was like, i that neither one of those sound like great to me. I definitely don't want to sales. I don't want to talk to people. I just want to like make cool shit and design things and make pretty pictures. Like I don't want to do sales.
00:14:13
Speaker
And yet I think we all figure out sales is a big part of it. Every idea I've ever had, you have to sell it to somebody to get it to, you know, get past the powers that be. So.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't why that was such a hard thing. And that was never something that I came across or was, or was taught. Yeah. um And I did sales before for the,
00:14:35
Speaker
the IT see company I worked for. So I knew the process of sales and relationship aspect. You did everything at this company, right? There was like five people at this company. I did. I did. Well, that's what happens when you work for a small company. You have to do ah you have to wear many hats.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yep. And I think that experience actually helped me see ah the world from different ah you know vantage points. from a sales vantage point, from a services, from a, I did technical stuff, like even hardware repairs and things. I did pretty much everything you could think of, but it gave me this really well-rounded sort of background where, oh, I could understand technology. I could understand the clients I'm working with, what they're building or what they're trying to sell. And so really helped in that ah aspect. So I think I would say like, if you're a creative person, you want to get into design, like you have to be pretty well-rounded in many aspects of business, not just creative.
00:15:29
Speaker
didn't go to art school and I'm, for that was probably a good thing for me not to go to art school. Cause I would think everything is about making things pretty and better. looking and interesting. And it's like, wow, there's a lot more to it than that.
00:15:43
Speaker
This is true. I think the the one area that I, from people that I've talked to that have gone to art school, because I'm the same, I did not, I dropped out of of college and just started working at an ad agency. But um the one thing I do think that you get from those experiences is the critiques and the, the you know, growing a thicker skin. Because I think that's one thing in starting up anything is,
00:16:09
Speaker
when you're starting out is, is not to feel like things are too precious to you and not to feel too attached to your designs and to your, your craft, because somebody somewhere is going to hate it and somebody is going to tear it apart and not, you know, and I think the art school environment I think it knocks, I was actually talking to so one of the designers I work with and i said, I told them like, I'm to tell you what I think is wrong with what you've sent me. And i hope you don't take it too personally. Like I'm just trying to give some constructive criticism.
00:16:42
Speaker
And they, they said something to the effect of like, I, I went through RISD and they knock that out of you. Like, you cannot go through the program and not get that over and over reinforced that people are going to tear your work apart.
00:16:57
Speaker
Right. I think that is that's one area. Cause I don't know about you, but in smaller companies and like when it's just you doing it and people are like liking what you do in general, I think you can get used to a little bit of that creative a freedom.
00:17:11
Speaker
So I do think, and you become overconfident. Yeah. Yeah. And then the first time when you like go out on your own and you do something creative for a client or something and they're like, no, I hate all of this. You're, you know, a little bit shattered.
00:17:25
Speaker
You have to work through it. Yeah. ah One of the things that I worked with a, um, a creative director, Um, maybe 10 years ago, we started working together.
00:17:36
Speaker
ah he had a ton of agency experience. So he came out of working in big advertising agencies. So they're, they're very process oriented the agency level.
00:17:48
Speaker
Um, And so he sort of became a mentor to me and kind of demonstrated a lot of um some of the tactics in client management um and sales, essentially, that I didn't really have knowledge of before.
00:18:05
Speaker
So everything started with like a new process, like, hey we need a creative brief after a meeting. I'm like, oh, really? Why do we need a creative meeting? You don't just go get started. You actually like write things down and figure out what the problem is and what you're trying to solve.
00:18:19
Speaker
Exactly. it was so interesting because i remember the first few times working together on like collaborating on projects, we'd have a meeting with like an initial meeting with a client just to, you know, ah to see if we had were a good fit for each other. Right. Yeah.
00:18:33
Speaker
And if they wanted to continue on with us, we would have a full kind of like brief that we wrote based on the meeting. Yeah. And it would essentially say, this is what you said.
00:18:43
Speaker
Here's what we said. Like, does this sound right? yeah And if they agreed to that and wanted to work with us, then we had kind of like a blueprint of like, okay, this has this becomes sort of the gospel that we've set forward with this engagement.
00:18:59
Speaker
um and then we always followed up every interaction with them. with like ah like a brief that we wrote, like, here's what we talked about today. And is there any if there's any problems with this, let us know.
00:19:10
Speaker
But it always gave us sort of a fallback. Like, well, no, we we we talked about that, right? so it was a really nice way to kind of see the project and shepherd the project through without it getting off track. and And um honestly, after that learning experience, I've like really never had any project kind of veer off course yeah because because of the processes that we put in place based on that mentor.
00:19:37
Speaker
And i need to I need to take that more into, for for those that don't know, Rocky and I, you know we worked closely together for the last, don't know, years. I guess since the pandemic, four and a half years. And then about six months ago, I took on a design director job for the information.
00:19:55
Speaker
is a tech media company. And um i I'm finding it that I'm missing some of that structure that you know we had going into meetings and coming out with like a clear plan.
00:20:06
Speaker
A lot of what I'm doing now, I feel like is is things are coming up, little projects, and some of them get a little bit more of a meeting and a little bit more of a you know, a to do and others are just sort of like, Hey, we should just make this and go do it. And then I kind of do it and then we'd launch it or something. And there was one recently that's just not been well received and we're having to redesign it.
00:20:31
Speaker
And that's an area where I feel like could have used a little bit more of that agency kind of let's make sure we are all aligned and like, what's the problem we're solving? What's the you know solution? So it definitely is something that, that I'm trying to take more into my, my current career back into ah corporate world and like where there, there isn't that self, you know, sort of self, I don't know, guided process.
00:21:01
Speaker
Right. Well, I also think it's a little different when you're in-house somewhere. Yeah. um And if you're setting kind of the criteria for, and you have different stakeholders in-house, right? You have, mean, for a publishing company, you have engineering team, which is going to be UX, UI sort of stuff. You have sales, which is going to be also part of UX, UI, but um maybe some other materials that need to be created and designed and processes in place.
00:21:28
Speaker
You have the marketing. So you have different stakeholders that you have to sort of, that you're, you know, working with if you're in a general sort of design role yeah internally at a company.
00:21:39
Speaker
um so the So essentially, agencies are typically working on a project. So it's something that's fairly clearly defined.
00:21:50
Speaker
If you're doing in-house, you have all these different stakeholders that have different priorities. um And different quote unquote projects that need the attention. So it's a little it's a little different, but all of those principles could still be put in place that they definitely can i think model.
00:22:07
Speaker
I think the biggest challenge that I've found, and you know these I have been at other companies and and you know been freelance and all that, but I think one of the biggest challenges is...
00:22:18
Speaker
is the nice thing about being at an agency and having clients that come to you or you go to the, you know, what however it comes about is you decide what the project is. Like you said, it's it's a single project. Usually you're going to work on it together.
00:22:33
Speaker
There's more clear lanes kind of provided. when you're in house, there is definitely this tendency, you know, we've talked about scope creep a lot where you, you, there's a scope of work that you're working on and you try not to let it kind of get beyond that.
00:22:48
Speaker
But when you're in house, it's like, there is no ability to kind of say like, that's beyond the scope of what we're going to do. Cause it's, you're, you're being paid to be there. And like, if somebody wants to do something, you kind of have, you, you can't say, no, I'm not going to take that project.
00:23:02
Speaker
You find somebody else to do that. It's like, No, you're you're in-house. You got to do make it work. So I definitely think that it's there's a lot to be taken from that agency side and and figuring out how to structure the process in the same sip like a similar way without being able to just say, no, I'm not going to not going to work on that.
00:23:23
Speaker
We could probably do a whole episode on just blind spots for people that are in creative. Yeah. Or that want to get into involved in creative. Great name for an episode blind the blank spots.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah. Because I have so many blind spots that I could go back and reflect on from not having sufficient contracts to um insufficiently communicating with clients.
00:23:47
Speaker
And these are just things you learn that kind of like, you know, bite you ah some point. Yeah. And if you have like awareness of these ahead of time, um I think that it would be super valuable.
00:24:00
Speaker
my you know like My pain is like you know your advantage, essentially. For sure.
00:24:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think that was like a pretty good start to our podcasting career, Rocky. what do you think? I think so, too. And i'm I'm looking forward to talking about deeper subjects, too, from what we might be seeing as an oversaturated design market coming up here with the...
00:24:27
Speaker
with the yeah The advent of ai generative ai getting in the mix. um Friend or foe, we have to talk about that. We have so many really, really cool topics. And let's not forget, we're going to pull in um some really great guests as well that are going to talk about their stories.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. um industries, various industries from photography, um startups, technology, marketing, of course, design, animation, motion, I could go through all the categories.
00:25:02
Speaker
I think that's what's going to be really great about our podcast is you're not just going to get our opinion on things, you're going to get, you know, somebody that's working in the field and in different creative ways.
00:25:14
Speaker
We're going to have a lot of different opinions coming in, a lot of different ideas being tossed around. So I hope everybody yeah enjoys what's to come. Absolutely. And this was probably a little bit shorter of an episode because we had some te technical difficulties in the beginning. This is our preview. This is our preview episode.
00:25:29
Speaker
It is a preview episode. I think we should just call it preview. Yeah. This is called soft launch. Soft launch. Rocky start. This is the rocky start.
00:25:42
Speaker
All right. Well, great. We want to thank everyone for listening in and looking forward to sharing our podcast next time. Yeah.
00:25:52
Speaker
I'm going reword. I'm going edit that and reword that. You know that, right? Yeah. you are Yeah. I want to thank everyone for joining us. I don't know how we close. How do we close? We could have a dramatic piano play. Apparently. I still say the, ah the ah inside the actor studio final question that we should close the show, but yeah, this is icebreaker.
00:26:13
Speaker
This is icebreaker. We'll, yeah we'll get better. And all this banter that we're having right now, we're probably going to edit out anyway. But we do need to intro. Or leave it in. Who knows? Maybe it has color. This is real. This is how it really works. I think this is the biggest takeaway from this show about starting up is don't wait until it's perfect.
00:26:32
Speaker
Perfection is the enemy of the done. Get something on paper. Get it done. Get started. Worry about polishing it up later. I think we end on that note. See you all next time.
00:26:44
Speaker
See all next time. like that.