Ideate Community Update #1
A brief summary: the road that brought us here
Ideate: The Future of Design Operations
About a year and a half ago, I realized that myself and the designers at my studio were spending a lot of time on mundane operational tasks that prevented us from doing the high impact creative work that we love and are paid to do.
These mundane operational design tasks included things like:
• formatting moodboards
• getting stuck in feedback loops
• trying to translate unclear feedback
• creating briefs, proposals, and brand presentations
• importing/exporting files
• onboarding/offboarding clients
We wanted to be doing high impact creative work like:
• Conceptualizing designs
• Establishing design standards and systems
• Iterating on visual identities and campaigns
• Long term strategizing
• Innovating within the design field
• Solving our clients problems
I imagined a world where designers could just design…
I ideated (no pun intended) a technological solution and recruited long time friend, Kyle Wigley (Wigs) to help bring this tool to life. He brought a wealth of experiencing building SaaS products, which paired perfectly with my design process obsession.
However, we still didn’t know how to fully validate the concept. One day, I stumbled across a program called 1Philadelphia’s Early Validation Academy. Through this 10 week course, we were able to learn how to tell if our idea was worth pursuing.
Turns out it was! We were selected as winner’s of the EVA program and invited to pitch at Philadelphia’s Innovation Festival
We were on to something, but we wanted more validation with the opinions that really matter - designers. Over the next several months, we spoke to over 150 designers at all different stages of their careers and we were overwhelmed with the positive feedback. The industry needs a solution.
This past March, we decided it was time to really focus on building that solution. Wigs took a new job that allowed him significantly more time to build, and I made the difficult decision to limit Linden Ave’s new clients and focus on helping our fellow designers.
The next several months we got rolling!
We hit the road talking to any designer that we could and were able to grow our waitlist to almost 5000 design leaders including designers from organizations like IBM, Meta, Intel, Intuit, The Philadelphia Phillies (Red October baby!) and some of my favorite design agencies!
We recruited some amazing advisors
James Helms - A designer with over 20+ years of Creative Direction and Design experience, as well as a former Vice President of Design and Product at Intuit.
Bill Starkey - A designer with over 20+ years of Creative Direction and Design experience, as well as a current Professor of Design at Temple, Kutztown and University of Delaware.
Josh Freivogel - A former Head of Product who has taken 5+ major SaaS platform products from ideation to launch to $101M acquisitions.
We heard some no’s.
Although we had a strong waitlist, a lot of the venture capital firms that we spoke with felt that we were too early to invest and they wanted to see more traction.
We built a prototype!
and got some amazing feedback from designers that we really admired!
and we continue to keep working…
If you got this far, I highly encourage you to head to our website, join our waitlist, and schedule a 1 on 1 prototype demo!
- Rahmi
