The End and the New Beginning
Day 30 of #30DaysOfStartingUp
Today concludes my 30 days of starting up project! I wrote a newsletter every day for 30 days, documenting my journey on founding Typogram with Hua Shu.
Typogram is a brand design app for non-designers, aiming to help startup founders create company branding with ease.
We experimented with the first step of discovering brand identity through a brand personality workshop. We launched a mini product and made our first dollar on the Internet!
We started to develop the second step to choose typefaces base on the brand personalities. I made an app using Retool and am finishing off the details and developing a launch plan. Stay tuned!
We have also been working on the main Typogram app and applied it to the Y Combinator accelerator! We hit the submit button only two days ago; I will let you know if we are accepted into the interview round or rejected.
On the side, I also dabbled with growth hacking and developed a web app to help programmers choose coding fonts. I am holding off on launching it to prepare something we can promote alongside its launch. I was too eager to launch side projects in the past that I didn’t capitalize on their traffic enough. I couldn’t believe one of my projects had 30,000 visitors on launch day, and I got nothing from it except AWS bills!
In the past 30 days, I learned many lessons in a very condensed way. Would I recommend doing the “30 days of starting up” project to other founders? Absolutely. Here are my reasons:
It creates momentum
It helps structure the workday
It is free marketing
It creates historical artifacts about company roots
It prevents you from feeling blue about leaving your beloved full-time job (when applicable, YMMV)
In upcoming weekly issues, I will share more about developing our main Typogram app and learnings, toolings, and side hack along the way.
If you haven’t already, drag this Email into your primary tab. I find that super helpful to make sure I don’t miss my favorite weekly newsletters.
See you next on September 20th!