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Articles by Soren Iverson
What I learned after 2 years of trying and failing to build a fintech startup
Merchant facing dashboard. Image courtesy of the author. A little over two years ago, I began work on a startup with two of my peers. At the beginning, I thought we were onto something huge. My responsibilities included product design, management, and marketing. Looking back, I failed. A lot. I’m not proud of it, but I learned valuable lessons. If you are toying with the idea of creating a startup, this one’s for you: Part of our design system. Image courtesy of the author.
Quibi Was Destined to Fail
And no, they can’t blame a pandemic. Image by Ali Martín Filsoof In April of 2020, Quibi took my LinkedIn feed by storm. The short-form mobile video platform just launched on the app store. A simple concept in theory: highly curated content made for a mobile device. I doubted the business model. While I’m not the target customer, $4.99/mo for a subscription with ads and $7.99/mo ad-free seems steep, especially since a “show” is less than 10 minutes long. My gut was right.
5 Things I Wish I Knew When Starting My Design Career
You don’t learn these in school. Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash I enjoyed my college experience. I learned a lot of valuable lessons, but looking back, it did not adequately prepare me for my career as a designer. We’ve all experienced this. You enter the workforce and there’s a million things you don’t know. That’s okay. You will learn. If I could go back to graduation, I wish I could tell myself these things: You got a job at the hottest startup in town.
Rabid dogs and Kate Hopkins’ Twitter ban
Rabid dogs and Kate Hopkins’ Twitter ban Street dogs roam freely in India. A familiar sight in towns and villages, groups of them will congregate around abundant sources of waste food from all the way north and south of the continent. But roughly 36% of the world’s rabies deaths occur in India each year, most of those when children come into contact with infected dogs. For a long time, authorities would use violent methods to clear towns from the all too real risk of the virus.
Here’s why you are not getting hired as a product designer
What I’ve learned from many failed interviews. Interviewing is hard. Interviewing during a global pandemic and mass layoffs is very hard. I’ve made a lot of mistakes during interviews for UX, UI and product roles. Read this if you don’t want to make the same mistakes.
5 Simple Things You Need to Know About Startup Equity
It’s not as complicated as it seems. When I got my first job at a startup, I received equity in the company. The process was confusing, and I had a lot of paperwork to go through. There was so much legal language. I didn’t know where to start. I had to figure out what it all meant on my own time. At the end of it all, my equity ended up being worth nothing. I wish I had someone to explain the ins and outs of stock options as I began my career.
Here’s How Designers can Build Trust and Collaborate with Developers
It’s all about taking responsibility. A couple years ago, I received a staging link from a developer. We had been working together on a large project for over 2 months. Today was the day I finally get to see our work come to life. I open the link. The button hover state is wrong. The font sizing is off. The colors on the homepage don’t look right. Responsive is a mess. Everything looks wrong. I was so frustrated. Why can’t developers build what I design? It’s not that hard.
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