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!